Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky came of an ancient noble family.  His father, a strangely whimsical man, determined that his son should grow up a Spartan.  A gymnastic instructor was his principal teacher, although he also studied natural science, mathematics, and international law.  Music, as a pursuit unworthy of a man, was discarded.  The female sex he was taught to hold in contempt, and all the gentler arts and emotions were rigorously repressed.  The boy was conscious of defects in his education, and from his eighteenth year set himself to remedy them as far as he could.  His father died when he was twenty-two, and young Lavretsky determined to go to Moscow, in the hope that diligent study might enable him to regain the ground lost in youth.

The whole tendency of his education had been to make him into a shy man:  he could not get on with people; with an unquenchable thirst for love in his heart, he had never yet dared to look a woman in the face.  Robust, rosy-cheeked, bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on his companions, who did not suspect that this outwardly austere man was inwardly almost a child.  He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, made no overtures to him, and he avoided them.  During the first two years he spent at the University he only became fairly intimate with one student, Mihalevitch by name, for he took lessons in Latin.

One day at the theatre he saw in a box in the front tier a young girl leaning her elbow on the velvet of the box.  The light of youth and life played in every feature of her lovely dark oval face; subtle intelligence was expressed in the splendid eyes which gazed softly and attentively from under her fine brows, in the swift smile of her sensitive lips, in the very poise of her head, her hands, her neck.

Suddenly the door of her box opened, and a man came in—­it was Mihalevitch.  The appearance of this man, almost his only acquaintance in Moscow, on the society of the girl who had suddenly absorbed his whole attention, struck him as curious and significant.  The performance ceased to interest Lavretsky, and at one pathetic part he involuntarily looked at his beauty:  she was bending forward, her cheeks glowing.  Under the influence of his persistent gaze her eyes slowly turned and rested on him.

All night he was haunted by those eyes.  The skilfully constructed barriers were broken down at last; he was in a shiver and a fever, and the next day he went to Mihalevitch, from whom he learnt that her name was Barbara Paulovna Korobyin.  Mihalevitch offered to introduce him; Lavretsky blushed, muttered something unintelligible, and ran away.  For five whole days he struggled with his timidity; on the sixth he got into a new uniform and placed himself at Mihalevitch’s disposal.

Paul Petrovitch Korobyin was a retired major-general.  With the intention of improving his pecuniary position, he devised a new method of speculating with public funds—­an excellent method in itself—­but he neglected to bribe in the right place.  Information was laid against him, and as a result of the subsequent inquiry he was advised to retire from active service.  In Moscow he lived the life of a retired general on 2750 roubles a year.