A Russian Gentleman

First published in 1856 as a family chronicle, this book is a memoir-novel of the Bagrov household, a lightly renamed version of Aksakov's own gentry line. Stepan Mikhailovich, a landowner in the reign of Catherine, sells cramped ancestral land in Simbirsk and moves his serfs to new steppe holdings in the Ufa country, bought from Bashkir owners. A second fragment portrays the charming and brutal kinsman Kurolesov. Later sections follow the courtship and uneasy marriage of Stepan's son Alexei and Sofia Nikolaevna, and their life in Ufa. The book is a portrait of household power on the eastern frontier of the empire.

Bound in grey open-weave cloth over pale orange boards, black leather spine-label. Dark purple endleaves. Orange-brown slipcase.