The Torrents of Spring

A Russian gentleman of fifty-two, sorting old papers, finds a small garnet cross and remembers the summer in Frankfurt when he was twenty-two, saved a girl's brother in a confectioner's shop, and was engaged within the week — until a schoolfriend's wife took an interest in him. Turgenev wrote it late, in exile, and gave it to the past tense entirely. Forty-nine plates of flowers and spring light, from Beyer's bouquets to Shishkin's forest, catch the brief bloom and long regret of Turgenev's late tale.