It is a winter evening, and Yegor Aduyev, the scion of a wealthy family from the landed gentry, slips into the house of Baron Neilein with the intention of asking his beautiful daughter, the eighteen-year-old Yelena, to be his wife. Will the besotted lover be successful in his pursuit or will the young coquette - who seems at times to reciprocate his feelings, but who lavished lingering looks on two dashing princes during a recent ball - shatter his hopes, his dreams and his entire world?A Serendipitous Error, an early novella of 1839, written when Goncharov was still in his twenties, is accompanied here by Two Incidents at Sea, a story penned almost twenty years later and based on two dangerous scrapes the author survived during his recent voyage on the frigate Pallada. Taken together, these two stories - translated for the first time into English by Stephen Pearl - are further proof of the eclectic narrative skills of the celebrated author of Oblomov.