The country house in which Anna Sergeyevna lived stood on the slope of a low hill not far from a yellow stone church with a green roof, white columns, and decorated with a fresco over the main entrance, representing The Resurrection of Christ in the Italian style. Especially remarkable for its voluminous contours was the figure of a swarthy soldier in a helmet, sprawling in the foreground of the picture. Behind the church stretched a long village street with chimneys peeping out here and there from thatched roofs. The manor house was built in the same style as the church, the style now famous as that of Alexander I; the whole house was painted yellow, and it had a green roof, white columns and a pediment with a coat of arms carved on it. The provincial architect had designed both buildings according to the instructions of the late Odintsov, who could not endure — as he expressed it — senseless and arbitrary innovations. The house was flanked on both sides by the dark trees of an old garden; an avenue of clipped pines led up to the main entrance,

Our friends were met in the hall by two tall footmen in livery; one of them ran at once to fetch the butler. The butler, a stout man in a black tail coat, promptly appeared and led the visitors up a staircase covered with rugs into a specially prepared room in which two beds had been arranged with every kind of toilet accessory. It was evident that order reigned in the house; everything was clean, and there was everywhere a peculiar dignified fragrance such as one encounters in ministerial reception rooms.

“Anna Sergeyevna asks you to come to see her in half an hour,” the butler announced. “Have you any orders to give meanwhile?”

“No orders, my good sir,” answered Bazarov, “but perhaps you will kindly trouble yourself to bring a glass of vodka.”

“Certainly, sir,” said the butler, looking rather surprised, and went out, his boots creaking.

“What grand genre,” remarked Bazarov, “that’s what you call it in your set, I think. A Grand Duchess complete.”

“A nice Grand Duchess,” answered Arkady, “to invite straight away such great aristocrats as you and me to stay with her.”

“Especially me, a future doctor and a doctor’s son, and grandson of a village priest . . . you know that, I suppose . . . a village priest’s grandson, like the statesman Speransky,” added Bazarov, after a brief silence, pursing his lips. “Anyhow, she gives herself the best of everything, this pampered lady! Shan’t we soon find ourselves wearing tail coats?”

Arkady only shrugged his shoulders . . . but he, too, felt a certain embarrassment.

Half an hour later Bazarov and Arkady made their way together into the drawing room. It was a large lofty room, luxuriously furnished but with little personal taste. Heavy expensive furniture stood in a conventional stiff arrangement along the walls, which were covered in a buff wall paper decorated with golden arabesques. Odintsov had ordered the furniture from Moscow through a wine merchant who was a friend and agent of his. Over a sofa in the center of one wall hung a portrait of a flabby fair-haired man, which seemed to look disapprovingly at the visitors. “It must be the late husband,” whispered Bazarov to Arkady. “Shall we dash off?” But at that moment the hostess entered. She wore a light muslin dress; her hair, smoothly brushed back behind her ears, imparted a girlish expression to her pure, fresh face.

“Thank you for keeping your promise,” she began. “You must stay a little while; you won’t find it so bad here. I will introduce you to my sister; she plays the piano well. That’s a matter of indifference to you, Monsieur Bazarov, but you, Monsieur Kirsanov, are fond of music, I believe. Apart from my sister, an old aunt lives with me, and a neighbor sometimes comes over to play cards. That makes up our whole circle. And now let us sit down.”

Madame Odintsov delivered this whole little speech very fluently and distinctly, as if she had learned it by heart; then she turned to Arkady. It appeared that her mother had known Arkady’s mother and had even been her confidante in her love for Nikolai Petrovich. Arkady began to talk with warm feeling about his dead mother; meanwhile Bazarov sat and looked through some albums. “What a tame cat I’ve become,” he thought.

A beautiful white wolfhound with a blue collar ran into the drawing room and tapped on the floor with its paws; it was followed by a girl of eighteen with a round and pleasing face and small dark eyes. In her hands she held a basket filled with flowers.

“This is my Katya,” said Madame Odintsov, nodding in her direction.

Katya made a slight curtsey, sat down beside her sister and began arranging the flowers. The wolfhound, whose name was Fifi, went up to both visitors in turn, wagging its tail and thrusting its cold nose into their hands.

“Did you pick them all yourself?” asked Madame Odintsov.

“Yes,” answered Katya.

“Is auntie coming down for tea?”

“She’s coming.”

When Katya spoke, her face had a charming smile, at once bashful and candid, and she looked up from under her eyebrows with a kind of amusing severity. Everything about her was naive and undeveloped, her voice, the downy bloom on her face, the rosy hands with white palms and the rather narrow shoulders . . . she was constantly blushing and she breathed quickly.

Madame Odintsov turned to Bazarov. “You are looking at pictures out of politeness, Evgeny Vassilich,” she began. “It doesn’t interest you, so you had better come and join us, and we will have a discussion about something.”

Bazarov moved nearer. “What have you decided to discuss?” he muttered.

“Whatever you like. I warn you, I am dreadfully argumentative.”

“You?”

“Yes. That seems to surprise you. Why?”

“Because, so far as I can judge, you have a calm and cool temperament and to be argumentative one needs to get excited.”

“How have you managed to sum me up so quickly? In the first place I am impatient and persistent — you should ask Katya; and secondly I am very easily carried away.”

Bazarov looked at Anna Sergeyevna.

“Perhaps. You know best. Very well, if you want a discussion — so be it. I was looking at the views of Swiss mountains in your albums, and you remarked that they couldn’t interest me. You said that because you suppose I have no artistic feeling — and it is true I have none; but those views might interest me from a geological standpoint, for studying the formation of mountains, for instance.”

“Excuse me; but as a geologist, you would rather study a book, some special work on the subject and not a drawing.”

“The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.”

Anna Sergeyevna was silent for a few moments.

“So you have no feeling whatsoever for art?” she said, leaning her elbow on the table and by so doing bringing her face nearer to Bazarov. “How do you manage without it?”

“Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?”

“Well, at least to help one to know and understand people.”

Bazarov smiled. “In the first place, experience of life does that, and in the second, I assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves. All people resemble each other, in soul as well as in body; each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us; the slight variations are insignificant. It is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch tree.”

Katya, who was arranging the flowers one by one in a leisurely way, raised her eyes to Bazarov with a puzzled expression, and meeting his quick casual glance, she blushed right up to her ears. Anna Sergeyevna shook her head.

“The trees in a forest,” she repeated. “Then according to you there is no difference between a stupid and an intelligent person, or between a good and a bad one.”

“No, there is a difference, as there is between the sick and the healthy. The lungs of a consumptive person are not in the same condition as yours or mine, although their construction is the same. We know more or less what causes physical ailments; but moral diseases are caused by bad education, by all the rubbish with which people’s heads are stuffed from childhood onwards, in short, by the disordered state of society. Reform society, and there will be no diseases.”

Bazarov said all this with an air as though he were all the while thinking to himself. “Believe me or not as you wish, it’s all the same to me!” He slowly passed his long fingers over his whiskers and his eyes strayed round the room.

“And you suppose,” said Anna Sergeyevna, “that when society is reformed there will be no longer any stupid or wicked people?”

“At any rate, in a properly organized society it will make no difference whether a man is stupid or clever, bad or good.”

“Yes, I understand. They will all have the same spleen.”

“Exactly, madam.”

Madame Odintsov turned to Arkady. “And what is your opinion, Arkady Nikolayevich?”

“I agree with Evgeny,” he answered.

Katya looked at him from under her eyelids.

“You amaze me, gentlemen,” commented Madame Odintsov, “but we will talk about this again. I hear my aunt now coming in to tea — we must spare her.”

Anna Sergeyevna’s aunt, Princess X., a small shriveled woman with a pinched-up face like a fist, with staring bad-tempered eyes under her grey brows, came in, and scarcely bowing to the guests, sank into a broad velvet-covered armchair, in which no one except herself was privileged to sit. Katya put a stool under her feet; the old lady did not thank her or even look at her, only her hands shook under the yellow shawl which almost covered her decrepit body. The princess liked yellow, even her cap ............