“The District Doctor” is a wonderful Turgenev short story that appealed and influenced American authors, such as Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its writing style, and Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway for its focus on moments. As the Doctor says to a new acquaintance, “Sometimes you know people for a long time and never talk about anything that touches the soul; sometimes you start there on the first conversation.” This is reminiscent of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, in which people have moments of clarity when they act or don't act; here the Doctor explains such a moment in his life. The story starts quietly and ends with the Doctor being satisfied with winning a bit more than two rubles at the card game Preference.
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Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe. He witnessed the February Revolution in Paris (1848), and his subsequent connection with reform groups in Russia, along with his sympathetic 1852 eulogy of Nikolai Gogol (who satirized the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian empire), led to his arrest and one-month imprisonment in St. Petersburg. In 1879 the honorary degree of doctor of civil law was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford.
Deaver Brown is an author and entrepreneur. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his books include Crucial Conversations, Presidential Wisdom, George Washington: Farewell Address, and numerous others.