The investigation of this petition by the * * * district court has discovered: that the said present owner of the disputed estate, Lieutenant of the Guards Dubrovsky, gave the local assessor of the nobility the explanation that the estate now in his possession, the said village of Kistenevka, * * * souls with land and appurtenances, came to him as an inheritance after the death of his father, Sub-lieutenant of Artillery Dubrovsky, Gavrila Evgrafovich, who obtained it through purchase from the petitioner’s father, former provincial secretary, later collegiate assessor Troekurov, through the power of attorney granted by him in the year 17––, on the 30th day of August, notarized in the * * * district court, to the titular councilor Sobolev, Grigory Vassilyevich, who was to provide him, Dubrovsky’s father, with the deed, in which it would be stated that the entire estate, * * * souls with the land, obtained by him, Troekurov, through purchase from the clerk Spitsyn, had been sold to his, Dubrovsky’s, father, and the agreed sum, 3,200 roubles, had been received from the father in full and without return, and it was requested that the attorney Sobolev provide his father with the official deed. And meanwhile his father, by the same power of attorney, having paid the full sum, was to take over this estate purchased by him and manage it as its lawful owner until the deed was executed, and neither he, the seller Troekurov, nor anyone else was to intervene henceforth in this estate. But precisely when and in what office the deed was executed and given by Sobolev to his father, he, Andrei Dubrovsky, does not know, for he was in his earliest infancy at the time, and after his father’s death he was unable to find the said deed, and supposes that it may have been burned up, along with other papers and property, during the fire in their house that took place in the year of 17––, as is also known to the inhabitants of the village. And that the estate, since the purchase from Troekurov or the receipt of the power of attorney by Sobolev, that is, since the year 17––, and from the death of his father until the present day, has been in their, the Dubrovskys’, undisputed possession, this has been testified to by the local inhabitants, 52 persons in all, who, being questioned under oath, bore witness that indeed, as far as they could remember, the said disputed estate had been in the possession of the aforesaid Messrs Dubrovsky for some 70 years now with no dispute from anyone, but by precisely what act or deed they do not know. Whether the previous purchaser of the estate mentioned in this case, the former provincial secretary Pyotr Troekurov, had owned the said estate, they do not recall. The house of Messrs Dubrovsky burned down in a fire that occurred in the village during the nighttime some 30 years ago, while disinterested persons suppose that the average income of the aforementioned disputed estate, counting from that time on, could be no less than 2,000 roubles annually.
Counter to that, General-en-chef Troekurov, Kirila Petrovich, on January 3rd of this year, addressed this court with a petition that, although the aforesaid Lieutenant of the Guards Andrei Dubrovsky did present to the court the power of attorney that his father had issued to the titular councilor Sobolev, neither the original deed of purchase nor any sufficiently clear proof of such a deed, in compliance with the general regulations of chapter 19 and the decision handed down in the year of 1752 on the 29th day of November, was presented. Consequently, the power of attorney itself, owing to the death of its issuer, his father, by the decision of the year 1818, the * * * day of May, is now completely null and void. And moreover—
it is ordered that disputed estates be returned to their owners—by deed where there is a deed, and by investigation where there is no deed.
For the which estate, belonging to his father, he has already presented in evidence a deed of purchase, from which it follows, based on the aforesaid statutes, that it should be taken from the wrongful possession of the aforementioned Dubrovsky and given to him by right of inheritance. And since the aforesaid landowners, having in their possession an estate not belonging to them and without any legality, and wrongfully enjoying profits from it not belonging to them, then by calculation, as much as is due by right of…should be exacted from the landowner Dubrovsky and be given to him, Troekurov, in satisfaction.—Upon the examination of which case and of extracts from it and from the law in the * * * district court,
