Two young girls, “poplar and birch”, Lizaveta Grigoryevna Bakhareva and Eugenia Petrovna Glovatskaya return from Moscow after graduation from the institute. Along the way, they enter the monastery to Aunt Bakhareva, Mother Superior of Agnia, where Lisa shows new views on the role of women in the family and life. There, the girls get acquainted with the ingenuous young nun Feoktistoy, who lost her husband and child and escaped to the monastery from her stern mother-in-law. In the village of Merevo, the girls are greeted by the leader Yegor Nikolayevich Bakharev with “childishly simple-hearted blue eyes,” restrained Pyotr Lukich Glovatsky, Lisa’s mother Olga Sergeevna and her sisters: Zinaida, who married the landowner Shatohin, but periodically runs away from her husband to her parents, and Sonia, young lady, what a lot. ” Here is the candidate of jurisprudence Justin Pomada, “very pretty,
Soon Glovatsky and his daughter leave for the district hail, where the father again performs the duties of the schoolmaster of the school, and Jenny is willing to take up a simple farm. Frequent guests of their house are two “respectable young people” Nikolai Stepanovich Vyazmitinov and Alexei Pavlovich Zarnitsyn, a doctor Rozanov and several other people who make up “a circle of very short and very friendly to a friend of not demanding people – a completely new phenomenon in the county’s life.” Zarnitsyn
In Moscow, Rozanov settles down at his university friend, the investigating officer, Evgraf Fedorovich Nechai and his wife Dashi, gets acquainted with the regular visitors of their apartment – the hostess of the house by Captain Davydovskaya and the proofreader Ardalion Arapov, who introduces Rozanov to the Moscow circle of “his” people and Kazimierz’s house Ratsiborsky, who later turned out to be a Polish conspirator who decided to use “new people” for his own purposes. Arapov represents the doctor of the “strange” person – already familiar to Rozanov Frenchman Rainer, as well as Beloyartsev, Zavulonov and other “socialists.” Arapov represents a doctor of “someone else’s” man – already familiar to Rozanov Frenchman Paradise