Introduction

“I’ve come across some stories in my time. The things people tell you when they think they’re on the brink...”

A country doctor recounts a story to an aspiring Russian novelist. The tale is unexpected, short and bittersweet, rather like its subject: a love affair between the doctor and his dying patient, the beautiful and cultured Alexandra Andreyevna. Thrown together by her condition, they find a love imbued with an honesty and an urgency that most would find unbearable. But this young woman’s life is particularly fragile and in his desperate bid to cure her the doctor unwittingly prescribes the most dangerous drug of all.

Publication and Adaptation

The Country Doctor was first published in the Russian literary magazine The Contemporary in the late 1840s. It was one of many tales which would later comprise The Sportsman’s Notebook. Simon Day dramatises this enchanting story of frustrated love, bringing the elegance of Turgenev’s prose to life in a new way.