The doctor tells her bluntly about what he and everyone else really think about her. On her walk she sees the doctor Mihail Ivanovitch, but the conversation takes an unexpected turn as the doctor’s severe demeanour provokes her into probing his obvious lack of sympathy for her lamentations about the mistakes she had made since she had last seen him five years previously. THE PRINCESS (1889) The Princess Gavrilovna arrives in a splendid carriage at an historic monastery and tours the grounds in style, as she has been in the habit of doing for several years during the summer months. We see the sights and sounds of the steppe in the day and at night, we listen with Yegory to the talk of the peasants and their tales, and we are plunged intensely into the atmosphere of that vast land. On the way they meet a wagon-train driven by peasants with whom the young boy travels most of the way to his final destination. THE STEPPE (1888) The long journey of a young eight-year-old boy travelling with his uncle and a priest on an ancient carriage across the Ukrainian steppe to a distant town where he will go to school. The young man was constantly on the move and deeply impressed the narrator with his eternal quest for enlightenment. UPROOTED (1887) The narrator remembers a long conversation with a young man, recently-converted to Orthodoxy from the Jewish faith, at the great monastery in the Holy Mountains in the Ukraine where thousands of people had congregated for the yearly festivities there. But Ivan cannot find it in his heart to respond in kind. She walks with him along the road to town when he has finished his good-byes, and when they pause she breaks down in an impassioned avowal of love. He has been enchanted by his stay, by the beauty of the surrounding fields and forests, and by the host’s daughter Verochka. VEROCHKA (1887) Ivan Alexeyitch is leaving his hosts on a late-summer evening after having spent several months with them on a mission for the government. When they finally arrive what they discover scandalises both of them for different reasons. Kirilov is completely stunned with despair at what has happened and can hardly talk, but the man insists and Kirilov acknowledges that he is obliged to go with him. ENEMIES (1887) On a dark autumn evening the only child of the district doctor Kirilov has just died of diphtheria when a well-dressed man arrives at his door in a panic, urgently requesting that the doctor come to care for his wife. The man has done everything, seen everything and believed in everything, and opens his soul to his fellow-traveller, especially about the role women had played in his life. ON THE ROAD (1887) We follow the unfolding of the intense conversation in a country inn during a snow-storm between a big, powerful man who is resting there for the night with his daughter and a young noblewoman on her way to her family property nearby. The two go to the lady’s mansion, where the narrator realises the extent of the prince’s sad situation and how close he had previously been to an entirely different fate.
A TRIVIAL INCIDENT (1886) The narrator recounts how he and his companion, a Prince, had been prevented from hunting in the forest of Madame Kandurin, with whom the prince had formerly been connected.
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