Oryol Governorate
The chronicles were based on Leskov's own childhood reminiscences, stories he had heard of ways and lives of different families of the Oryol Governorate, in the 1830s and 1840s. One episode concerning the marriage of 50-year-old Plodomasov and 15-year-old Marpha might have had bearings on his own family history. His aunt Natalya Petrovna Alferyeva in 1824 as a teenager became the wife to 50-year-old landowner Strakhov, who proved to be a jealous and tyrannical husband.