Produced by Dave Kline, Tapio Riikonen and PG Distributed Proofreaders A RECKLESS CHARACTER And Other Stories BY IVAN TURGENIEFF Translated from the Russian by ISABEL F. HAPGOOD NEW YORK, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 1907. CONTENTS: A RECKLESS CHARACTER THE DREAM FATHER ALEXYEI'S STORY OLD PORTRAITS THE SONG OF LOVE TRIUMPHANT CLARA MILITCH POEMS IN PROSE ENDNOTES A RECKLESS CHARACTER[1] (1881) I There were eight of us in the room, and we were discussing contemporary matters and persons, "I do not understand these gentlemen!" remarked A.--"They are fellows of a reckless sort.... Really, desperate.... There has never been anything of the kind before." "Yes, there has," put in P., a grey-haired old man, who had been born about the twenties of the present century;--"there were reckless men in days gone by also. Some one said of the poet Yazykoff, that he had enthusiasm which was not directed to anything, an objectless enthusiasm; and it was much the same with those people--their recklessness was without an object. But see here, if you will permit me, I will narrate to you the story of my grandnephew, Misha Polteff. It may serve as a sample of the recklessness of those days." He made his appearance in God's daylight in the year 1828, I remember, on his father's ancestral estate, in one of the most remote nooks of a remote government of the steppes. I still preserve a distinct recollection of Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Polteff. He was a genuine, old-fashioned landed proprietor, a pious inhabitant of the steppes, sufficiently well educated,--according to the standards of that epoch,--rather crack-brained, if the truth must be told, and subject, in addition, to epileptic fits.... That also is an old-fashioned malady.... However, Andrei Nikolaevitch's attacks were quiet, and they generally terminated in a sleep and in a fit of melancholy.--He was kind of heart, courteous in manner, not devoid of some pomposity: I have always pictured to myself the Tzar Mikhail Feodorovitch as just that sort of a man.