I
THE events of the story which is now presented to the reader are so touching and terrible in their importance for the chief and heroic actor who took part in them, and the issue of the affair was so unique, that anything similar could scarcely have occurred in another country than Russia.
It forms in part a court anecdote, in part a historic event that characterizes fairly well the manners and the very strange tendencies of the uneventful period comprised in the third decade this nineteenth century.
There is no invention in the following story.
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