Though they are relatively little-known, these three novellas, The Inn, Punin and Baburin, and The Watch, are important works in the Turgenev canon, ranking not far below his major novels. Turgenev wrote The Inn in the autumn of 1852, when he was under a form of house arrest for the publication of the stories known as A Sportsman's Sketches. Frankly based on events that all "literally took place twenty-five versts from here," the story takes as its theme a motif that Turgenev came back to again and again in his later work: the helplessness of age before the successful ruthlessness of youth. Punin and Baburin and The Watch were written more than twenty years later, in France. In Punin he turned to his own childhood and youth: we see Turgenev himself in the young boy's initiation into poetry; later we share his life as a student, with its distractions and love affairs, and we see through his eyes the tragedy of the fierce young orphan girl tamed into marriage with her elderly benefactor. Finally, The Watch is a study of nineteenth-century teenagers, intensely conscious of themselves as a generation pitted against the stifling and hypocritical moralism of the adults around them. In its sensibility, The Watch is astonishingly modern. Punin and Baburin and The Watch have not been translated into English for sixty-three years, The Inn for forty-six. The three novellas, taken together, make a profound statement about art and life, youth and age, justice and injustice.