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. Sixty plates of Russian painting from 1811 to 1912, by Kramskoi and Perov among others, carry the grief and faith that hang over the Volga gentry.