This week I'm far from the mountains, orcas, and raincoat-clad hipsters of the Pacific Northwest. To visit family, I've traveled to a Midwestern cornfield. I've brought along Ivan Turgenev's play Mesiats v derevne (A Month in the Country) (1850) to keep me company.

I'm here to meet my niece Ellie and my nephew Collins for the first time. This has me thinking about greetings. How do introduce yourself to someone? What emotions are appropriate, and how should they be expressed?

One of the most memorable artworks of the 1990s is Bill Viola's The Greeting (1995), which shows three women greeting each other in extremely, exaggeratedly slow motion. You realize just how much goes into even the most casual of interpersonal exchanges: how many expressions flash across a face, how much of a body is drawn into the choreography, how many things could go wrong.

The Greeting is a silent piece--we do not hear what the women say to each other. By appealing solely to our eyes, Viola concentrates our attention on the myriad ways in which people physically and visually signal their feelings and intentions. He also, however, ends up loosening the connections between the moment of greeting and the specific social and historical context in which these women find themelves. How do these people know each other? How long have they known each other? What tone of voice do they adopt? In what year and in what city does this event unfold?

Plays, especially mid-nineteenth century realist plays such as Turgenev's, are better at addressing these sorts of questions. A Month in the Country seeks to expose how dependent even the smallest of everyday encounters is on intangibles such as education, upbringing, citizenship, and relative social status.

One such moment occurs in the first act. A rich landowner named Arkadii Sergeich Islaev walks into a room and discovers there Mikhailo Aleksandrovich Rakitin, a "friend of the household":

     (Vkhodit Islaev s ozabochennym vidom i snimaet shliapu.)

     ISLAEV. Zdravstvuite, Michel.

     RAKITIN. My uzhe videlis' segodnia.

     ISLAEV. A! Izvini . . . Ia sovershenno zakhlopotalsia. (Khodit po komnate.)

          * * * * *

     (Islaev enters. Looking preoccupied, he takes off his cap.)

     ISLAEV. Hello, Michel.

     RAKITIN. We've already seen each other today.

     ISLAEV. Ah! Pardon me . . . I've been so busy. (He walks around the room.)

So much in so few lines! First, we have Islaev on autopilot. He makes an effort to obey the proper social forms: he takes off his hat and tersely but correctly greets his visitor. He uses the French "Michel," too, instead of the Russian Mikhailo, to signal the other man's social standing. (The setting is the 1740s: the Russian gentry of the era spoke French among themselves as a sign of their good breeding--at least in theory. In practice, as the play ruthlessly reveals, their French could also be intermittent, mangled, and superfluous.)

So far so good, yes? No. Islaev commits a faux pas. It turns out that he's just said "hello" (zdravstvuite) to Rakitin for the second time in one day. In Russian culture to say "hello" to somebody is a significant act of recognition. Traditionally, for example, students in a class collectively "hello" their teacher at the start of the schoolday. If you happen to run into somebody to whom you've already said hello, you're supposed to pick up the conversation where you left off, make an observation about the weather, or otherwise reassure the other person That He or She Matters Enough To Be Remembered. In short, by double-hello-ing Rakitin, Islaev suggests that he is a forgettable nonentity.

Rakitin could take the slight gracefully. He doesn't. He rubs Islaev's face in it. He's being passive aggressive. As we the audience have just seen, he's courting Islaev's wife Natalia Petrovna, who has been indecisively leading him on. He chafes at the secrecy of their unconsummated affair, and his male ego bristles at the fact that his would-be rival is so complacent, so full of himself, that he doesn't even register Rakitin as a possible threat.

To compound the insult, Islaev readily apologizes, claiming as justification that he's been "bustling about" (a more literal translation of zakhlopotalsia). In other words, he assumes that being busy is a sufficient excuse for his rudeness. He then quickly dismisses the incident from his mind. Immediately after his almost offensively brusque and intimate "forgive [me]"--izvini, an imperative that omits the formal ending te--he starts wandering around the room, first mulling over and then inarticulately expostulating about an unrelated topic.

Having spoken no more than two sentences, Islaev reveals himself to be crude and uncultured. One now much better appreciates his wife's toska (deep melancholy). Easily the wittiest and most sophisticated person in this tiny provincial society, Natalia Petrovna is near-feverish in her desire to find someone, anyone, she can relate to on an equal footing. Worse, she fears that she is growing old, and that her glory years will have been wholly wasted. Islaev is the archetypal pomeshchik (landowner), more knowledgeable about agriculture than he is about high society. If he can't even treat his male peers civilly, one can only imagine how he would behave toward his wife in private.

If Turgenev staged the moment when I first said hello to my two-year-old nephew, how would he do it? He'd likely highlight Collins's silent reply: he brought over and showed me a plastic dog from a Richard Scarry play set. Weirdly, it was one of my own toys--well, it used to be, back in the early 1970s. Now it's his. I hadn't thought about it for thirty years, and I had no clue that it had made its way here, to Illinois, to entertain another kid. Dramatic irony? Return of the repressed? Durned if I know.