Turgenev's novella remembers the sixteen-year-old narrator's infatuation with a twenty-one-year-old woman staying next door during a summer at the dacha. The revelation that comes at the end transforms everything that came before, and Turgenev handles it with such delicacy that the shock deepens rather than cheapens. The prose is elegiac, autumnal, though the events take place in summer. It is one of the great accounts of adolescent passion, and of the moment when the adult world reveals its full complexity.