Nicholas Alexeievitch Nekrassov was the descendant of a noble family,
which in former years had been very wealthy, but subsequently had lost
the greater part of its estates. His father was an officer in the army,
and in the course of his peregrinations from one end of the country to
the other in the fulfilment of his military duties he became acquainted
with a young Polish girl, the daughter of a wealthy Polish aristocrat.
She was seventeen, a type of rare Polish beauty, and the handsome,
dashing Russian officer at once fell madly in love with her. The parents
of the girl, however, were horrified at the notion of marrying their
daughter to a "Muscovite savage," and her father threatened her with his
curse if ever again she held communication with her lover. So the matter
was secretly arranged between the two, and during a ball which the young
Polish beauty was attending she suddenly disappeared. Outside the house
the lover waited with his sledge. They sped away, and were married at
the first church they reached.
The bride, with her father's curse upon her, passed straight from her
sheltered existence in her luxurious home to all the unsparing rigours
of Russian camp-life. Bred in an atmosphere of maternal tenderness and
Polish refinement she had now to share the life of her rough, uncultured
Russian husband, to content herself with the shallow society of the
wives of the camp officers, and soon to be crushed by the knowledge that
the man for whom she had sacrificed everything was not even faithful
to her.
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