The story tells the story of love and life of a Russian landowner. In the late 1860s and the first half of the 1870s, Turgenev wrote a number of stories belonging to the category of memories of the distant past ("Brigadier," "The Story of Lieutenant Ergunov," "Unhappy," "Strange Story," "Steppe King Lear," "Knock, knock, knock," "Spring water," "Punin and BabUrin," "Knocks," etc.).