A House of Gentlefolk

"A House of Gentlefolk" by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev is a window into 19th-century Russian society, where a widowed woman, Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin, grapples with family, expectations, and her own identity in a changing world. We meet Marya, her aunt, and others as conversations spark about family matters and social pressures, while past scandals slowly begin to reemerge with the return of Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky. His shadowed past becomes the setting for the unfolding drama, drawing readers into a world of love, loss, and the limitations of societal rule among the Russian gentlefolk.