46 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PushkinThe Captain's Daughter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1836A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Sergeant of the Guards”
Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussion of graphic violence.
Protagonist Pyotr Grinyov grows up on a large country estate as the only child of retired lieutenant colonel Andrey Petrovitch Grinyov. From the age of five, he is tutored by his father’s senior huntsman and serf (indentured servant) Savelich. When he turns 12, his father hires a Frenchman named M. Beaupré to take over his education. Beaupré has an alcohol dependency and teaches Pyotr very little. One day, two of the female servants complain that M. Beaupré had “taken advantage of their inexperience” (4), and so Beaupré is fired.
In 1772, when Pyotr is 16, Pyotr’s father decides it is time for him to join the imperial military under Catherine the Great. Pyotr hoped to go to St. Petersburg, but instead Andrey sends him to Orenburg, “a godforesaken backwater” (6) in southwestern Russia near Kazakhstan. He wants Pyotr to do real military service, and he believes service there will build character. Before he leaves, Pyotr’s mother gives Pyotr a hareskin coat.
Pyotr leaves with Savelich. They stop at the town of Simbirsk. At the inn, Pyotr meets a Hussar captain named Ivan Ivanovich Zurin.
