It is a winter evening, and Yegor Aduyev, the scion of a wealthy family from the landed gentry, slips into the house of Baron Neyleyn with the intention of asking his beautiful daughter, the eighteen-year-old Yelena, to be his wife. Will the besotted lover be successful in his pursuit or will the young coquette—who seems at times to reciprocate his feelings, but who lavished lingering looks on two dashing princes during a recent ball—shatter his hopes, his dreams and his entire world?

A Serendipitous Error, written in 1839, when Goncharov was still in his twenties, is accompanied here by another early novella, An Evil Malady and a short fictional fragment. Taken together, these stories—translated for the first time into English—are further proof of the eclectic narrative skills of the celebrated author of Oblomov.