Satirizes a type of man who came to prominence in the later part of the nineteenth century in Russia; he was typically upper middle class, was married to a materialistic woman, and commuted to work in St Petersburg during the summer while his wife and children vacationed at the family's dacha in Pavlovsk.

IVAN SHCHEGLOV was the nom de plume of a Russian army captain whose real name was Ivan Leont'evich Leont'ev (1856-1911). His writing career flourished in the 1880s, during which time he collaborated with Chekhov on a farce entitled The Power of Hypnotism, recently translated and published in Laurence Senelick's edition of The Complete Plays: Anton Chekhov.

MICHAEL R. KATZ is the C. V. Starr Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has translated many novels from Russian, including Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Devils, and Turgenev's Fathers and Children. He previously translated Polinka Saks by Aleksandr Druzhinin and Antonina by Evgeniya Tur for Northwestern University Press.