The Precipice

An artist and dilettante comes down from Petersburg to his grandmother's estate on the Volga to find himself, and finds instead two cousins, a nihilist in the hills, and a garden with a ravine at the end of it where a man once shot himself. Goncharov spent thirty years in government service, much of it as a censor, and twenty writing this, his last novel and the one he defended most fiercely; it is his answer to the new men, and it does not go the way he intended.