All 7 Uses of
provincial
in
The Brothers Karamazov
- At the time of Yefim Petrovitch's death Alyosha had two more years to complete at the provincial gymnasium.†
Chpt 1 *
- to abandon his betrothed, a rare beauty, Katerina Ivanovna, who's rich, and the daughter of a colonel, and to marry Grushenka, who has been the mistress of a dissolute old merchant, Samsonov, a coarse, uneducated, provincial mayor.†
Chpt 2
- It happened one clear, warm, moonlight night in September (many years ago) five or six drunken revelers were returning from the club at a very late hour, according to our provincial notions.†
Chpt 3
- It was a large room, elegantly and amply furnished, not at all in provincial style.†
Chpt 3
- He admitted himself, when talking about it afterwards, that only then had he seen "how handsome the woman was," for, though he had seen her several times before, he had always looked upon her as something of a "provincial hetaira."†
Chpt 9
- It belonged to Madame Krassotkin, the widow of a former provincial secretary, who had been dead for fourteen years.†
Chpt 10
- He went straight to the point, and began by saying that although he practiced in Petersburg, he had more than once visited provincial towns to defend prisoners, of whose innocence he had a conviction or at least a preconceived idea.†
Chpt 12
Definitions:
-
(1)
(provincial as in: provincial attitude) unsophisticated (meant disapprovingly to refer to old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas)
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Provincial can also mean "related to a province" or "related to the provinces." Its more literary meaning of unsophisticated originated as a pejorative term for ideas held in the provinces that were considered old-fashioned or uninformed by many who lived in the capital city.