Moscow

Moscow is the setting for the narrator’s recollection of the summer of 1833, when he was sixteen and his first love began. The city appears in two contrasting forms: a country residence near its edge, where the family spends the summer, and the family’s house on Arbaty Street, to which they later prepare to return.

Setting and Summer Residence

The narrator lives with his parents at a country house near the Kalouga gate, facing Neskutchny Gardens. The family has taken the house for the summer while he prepares for university, though he admits he does little work and feels no urgency to begin. This setting places him between the city and the countryside: close enough to walk in the gardens and beyond the town gates, yet removed from the ordinary routine of town life.

Return to Town

As the family prepares to leave the country house, the destination is their house on Arbaty Street. The move marks a change in the summer’s setting, from the outskirts to the town itself. The preparations proceed quietly and without haste, even as the narrator longs for the unsettled episode at the country house to end.

Narrative Significance

Moscow supplies the geography for the recollection’s threshold: the narrator’s youthful summer begins at the city’s edge and is brought toward its conclusion by the family’s return to town. The contrast between the open walks around Neskutchny Gardens and the impending move to Arbaty Street gives the setting a temporal function as well as a geographical one, marking the passage from a suspended summer into the next phase of family life.