“In the first years of the first decade of the current, rich in great events, nineteenth century, therefore, more than fifty years, in one semi-steppe and semi-forest province remote from the capitals, adjacent to our real indigenous forest provinces, Perm and Vyatka, in a complete outback, lived a rich and numerous noble family of the Boldukhins in the five-hundred-person village of Voznesenskoye, Boldukhino also; lived in the full sense of the countryside...”