The author of this book is writer Irina Chaikovskaya. Besides fiction prose, she has written several scholarly articles about Turgenev, Nekrasov, Panayeva, etc. She thoroughly studied documentary materials, notes from contemporaries, correspondence, and the memories of her characters, delving deeply into their complicated relationships—and in her book she tried to follow the document. But her stories are fiction prose. Where exact facts ended, she followed her own intuition and the “clues” she drew from the works of her characters and from their recollections. The main thing in the book is the author’s love for the characters—among them, besides Turgenev, Nekrasov, and Panayeva mentioned above, there are such famous figures as Alexander and Natalya Pushkins, Alexander and Nikolai Herzen.
The book is written in a lively language, very entertaining, and intended for the widest circle of readers. Contents:
STORIES
Old Husband
The Mad Turgel
The Night Diligence
The Shaman’s Tooth
NOVELLA
The Case of Money (from the secret notes of Avdotya Panayeva)
Author’s Afterword