Liza | Page 3

general reader of M. Turg��nieffs merits. For my own part, I wish cordially to thank the French and the German translators of the Dvoryanskoe Gnyezdo for the assistance their versions rendered me while I was preparing the present translation of that story. The German version, by M. Paul Fuchs,[A] is wonderfully literal. The French version, by Count Sollogub and M.A. de Calonne, which originally appeared in the Revue Contemporaine, without being quite so close, is also very good indeed.[B]
[Footnote A: Das adelige Nest. Von I.S. Turg��nieff. Aus dem Russicher ubersetzt von Paul Fuchs. Leipzig, 1862.]
[Footnote B: Une Nich��e de Gentilshommes. Paris, 1862]
I, too, have kept as closely as I possibly could to the original. Indeed, the first draft of the translation was absolutely literal, regardless of style or even idiom. While in that state, it was revised by the Russian friend who assisted me in my translation of Krilofs Fables--M. Alexander Onegine--and to his painstaking kindness I am greatly indebted for the hope I venture to entertain that I have not "traduced" the author I have undertaken to translate. It may be as well to state that in the few passages in which my version differs designedly from the ordinary text of the original, I have followed the alterations which M. Turg��nieff made with his own hand in the copy of the story on which I worked, and the title of the story has been altered to its present form with his consent.
I may as well observe also, that while I have inserted notes where I thought their presence unavoidable, I have abstained as much as possible from diverting the reader's attention from the story by obtrusive asterisks, referring to what might seem impertinent observations at the bottom of the page. The Russian forms of name I have religiously preserved, even to the extent of using such a form as Ivanich, as well as Ivanovich, when it is employed by the author.
INNER TEMPLE, June 1, 1869.

LIZA.

I.
A beautiful spring day was drawing to a close. High aloft in the clear sky floated small rosy clouds, which seemed never to drift past, but to be slowly absorbed into the blue depths beyond.
At an open window, in a handsome mansion situated in one of the outlying streets of O., the chief town of the government of that name--it was in the year 1842--there were sitting two ladies, the one about fifty years old, the other an old woman of seventy.
The name of the first was Maria Dmitrievna Kalitine. Her husband, who had formerly occupied the post of Provincial Procurator, and who was well known in his day as a good man of business--a man of bilious temperament, confident, resolute, and enterprising--had been dead ten years. He had received a good education, and had studied at the university, but as the family from which he sprang was a poor one, he had early recognized the necessity of making a career for himself and of gaining money.
Maria Dmitrievna married him for love. He was good-looking, he had plenty of sense, and, when he liked, he could be very agreeable. Maria Dmitrievna, whose maiden name was Pestof, lost her parents while she was still a child. She spent several years in an Institute at Moscow, and then went to live with her brother and one of her aunts at Pokrovskoe, a family estate situated fifteen versts from O. Soon afterwards her brother was called away on duty to St. Petersburgh, and, until a sudden death put an end to his career, he kept his aunt and sister with only just enough for them to live upon. Maria Dmitrievna inherited Pokrovskoe, but she did not long reside there. In the second year of her marriage with Kalitine, who had succeeded at the end of a few days in gaining her affections, Pokrovskoe was exchanged for another estate--one of much greater intrinsic value, but unattractive in appearance, and not provided with a mansion. At the same time Kalitine purchased a house in the town of O., and there he and his wife permanently established themselves. A large garden was attached to it, extending in one direction to the fields outside the town, "so that," Kalitine, who was by no means an admirer of rural tranquillity, used to say, "there is no reason why we should go dragging ourselves off into the country." Maria Dmitrievna often secretly regretted her beautiful Pokrovskoe, with its joyous brook, its sweeping meadows, and its verdant woods, but she never opposed her husband in any thing, having the highest respect for his judgment and his knowledge of the world. And when he died, after fifteen years of married life, leaving behind him a son and two daughters, Maria Dmitrievna had grown so accustomed to her house and to a town life, that she had