Aguas de primavera

At fifty-two years old, Dmitri Pavlovich Sanin, tired and with "aversion to life," reflects one night "on the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsehood of everything human." When searching through some drawers he found a small garnet cross that takes him back to his youth, when he, idle and carefree, traveled through Europe and ended up in Frankfurt. There he fell in love with Gemma, an Italian girl with "marbled arms like the goddesses of Olympus," and he became engaged to her. He had never known greater happiness. However, on a trip to Wiesbaden to sell his small estate and have money to get married, something changes. If he had believed that love is "like a revolution" capable of disrupting his entire being, now he suddenly enters a world of revocable principles and ambiguous, far from ideal relationships, and discovers unexpectedly destructive impulses.