{"product_id":"9781465590091","title":"A Reckless Character and Other Stories","description":"There were eight of us in the room, and we were discussing contemporary matters and persons, \"I do not understand these gentlemen!\" remarked A.—\"They are fellows of a reckless sort… . Really, desperate… . There has never been anything of the kind before.\" \"Yes, there has,\" put in P., a grey-haired old man, who had been born about the twenties of the present century;—\"there were reckless men in days gone by also. Some one said of the poet Yázykoff, that he had enthusiasm which was not directed to anything, an objectless enthusiasm; and it was much the same with those people—their recklessness was without an object. But see here, if you will permit me, I will narrate to you the story of my grandnephew, Mísha Pólteff. It may serve as a sample of the recklessness of those days.\" He made his appearance in God’s daylight in the year 1828, I remember, on his father’s ancestral estate, in one of the most remote nooks of a remote government of the steppes. I still preserve a distinct recollection of Mísha’s father, Andréi Nikoláevitch Pólteff. He was a genuine, old-fashioned landed proprietor, a pious inhabitant of the steppes, sufficiently well educated,—according to the standards of that epoch,—rather crack-brained, if the truth must be told, and subject, in addition, to epileptic fits… . That also is an old-fashioned malady… . However, Andréi Nikoláevitch’s attacks were quiet, and they generally terminated in a sleep and in a fit of melancholy.—He was kind of heart, courteous in manner, not devoid of some pomposity: I have always pictured to myself the Tzar Mikhaíl Feódorovitch as just that sort of a man.","brand":"Library Of Alexandria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47124799357168,"sku":"9781465590091","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781465590091_p0.jpg?v=1763685187","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781465590091","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}