[Footnote A:  “Fathers and Sons.”  Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler.  New York 1867.]

The French and German translations of M. Turgenieff’s works are excellent.  From the French versions of M. Delaveau, M. Xavier Marmier, M. Prosper Merimee, M. Viardot, and several others, a very good idea may be formed by the general reader of M. Turgenieffs 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.  Turgenieff.  Aus dem Russicher ubersetzt von Paul Fuchs.  Leipzig, 1862.]

[Footnote B:  Une Nichee 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. Turgenieff 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.