Novels and Stories Phantoms - 8 Author:Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev Volume: 8 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1903 Original Publisher: C. Scribner Subjects: Fiction / Literary Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial acce... more »ss to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Ill Anna Vasilievna Stakhoff, born Shubin, had been left a full orphan at seven years of age, and heiress to a fairly large property. She had relatives who were very wealthy, and relatives who were very poor; the poor ones on her father's side, the wealthy ones on her mother's: Senator Bolgin, the Princess Tchikurasoff. Prince Ar- dalion Tchikurasoff, who was appointed as her guardian, placed her in the best boarding-school in Moscow, and when she left school took her into his own house. He lived in handsome style, and gave balls in the winter. Anna Vasilievna's future husband, Nikolai Artemievitch Stakhoff, won her at one of these balls, where she wore " a charming pink gown, with a head-dress of tiny roses." She preserved that head-dress. . . . Nikolai Artemievitch Stakhoff, the son of a retired captain who had been wounded in the year 1812, and had received a lucrative post in Petersburg, had entered the military school at the age of sixteen, and graduated into the Guards. He was handsome, well built, and was considered about the best cavalier at evening parties of the middle class, which he chiefly frequented: he did not have access to fashionable society. Two dreams hadoccupied him from his youth up: to become an Imperial aide-de-camp and to make an advantageous marriage; he speedily renounced the first dream, but clung all the more tenaciously to the second. As a result of this, he went to Moscow every winter. Nikolai Artemievitch spoke French very respectably, and had the reputation of being a philosopher, because he did not...« less