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Introduction

Turgenev’s Sketches were originally published in the Russian journal The Contemporary between 1847 and 1851. In 1852 they were published for the first time in a separate edition – a circumstance that led to Turgenev’s arrest, followed by exile to his estate of Spasskoye. Much later, during the last decade of his life, he added further Sketches to those already published, with the result that the total number of such Sketches reached twenty-five.

This full translation has been given the title Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, rather than the slightly more usual – and perhaps slightly less accurate – title A Sportsman’s Sketches or A Sportsman’s Notebook, etc., because Turgenev’s work, although usually transliterated as Zapiski okhotnika and literally meaning Notes of a Hunter, is not so much about hunting as about the rural world of Russia that he knew so well. It is essentially an album of pictures drawn from Russian country life in the period prior to the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The manner and spirit of the original work are, to my mind, most appropriately conveyed by emphasizing the compact, pictorial quality which the word ‘Album’ can suggest. This translation has aimed at completeness, both by including all the Sketches omitted from the first edition published under this title (Penguin Classics, 1967) and by including in an Appendix the fragments which are now generally regarded as forming part of the work as a whole.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in Oryol, some two hundred or so miles south of Moscow, in 1818. He spent his boyhood on his mother’s estate of Spasskoye. Here he naturally learned about the injustices of the serf system as well as experiencing its brutalities through the frequent beatings meted out to him by his mother. He survived such domestic tyranny, concealed though it may have been behind a façade of civilized values, but the experience taught him to detest all tyrannies, especially the tyranny of serfdom and the political tyranny of Tsarist absolutism. Apart from some indifferent home teaching and schooling, he received a higher education at the universities of Moscow and St Petersburg and then went abroad, to Berlin University, at the end of the 1830s. The experience of western Europe turned him into a convinced advocate of European civilization. He returned to Russia in 1841 as a Westernizer or Westernist (zapadnik) and remained true to that conviction for the rest of his life. Westernists, it should be explained, were those members of the Russian intelligentsia who were committed to the belief that Russia should be westernized, following the initiative already taken in this respect by Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They were opposed by the Slavophiles, who wished to reject western influences and based their hopes for Russia on the Orthodox Church and the presumed spiritual and social superiority of things Russian.

Although Turgenev had been writing poems and articles since the middle of the 1830s, it was not until 1843 that he published his first successful work, a long narrative poem entitled Parasha. He was praised for this work by the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and it was partly due to Belinsky’s influence that Turgenev began to devote himself to realistic depiction of the inadequacies in Russian society. Thus he became not only a chronicler of his own generation and his own society, but also a critic of his own generation’s Hamletism and of the fundamental injustice of serfdom on which Russian society was based. In some respects, Turgenev’s assumption of such roles was accidental. Intending to be a poet, he had by the latter part of the 1840s begun to demonstrate that he had remarkable talents as a writer of prose; intending to write a series of ‘physiological’ sketches of urban life on the lines of Gogol’s St Petersburg Stories or Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, he found himself writing about the Russian countryside in which he had grown up; intending, in a moment of despair, to abandon literature for good, he left a short work entitled ‘Khor and Kalinych’ in the editorial offices of the newly resuscitated journal The Contemporary, and the success of the work when it was first published early in 1847 (with an editorial subtitle describing it as ‘from the Notes of a Hunter’) persuaded Turgenev to return to literature and marked the beginning of the Sketches, which were to bring him lasting fame.

A representative of the new Russian intelligentsia, as much at home in Paris or Berlin as in Moscow or St Petersburg, of noble birth, liberal political inclinations and cosmopolitan culture, extraordinarily gifted and well-read, Turgenev possessed an urbane charm that made him excellent company in any society. Though he admired women, he never married. His emotional life was dominated by the attachment which he formed for the famous singer Pauline Viardot, whom he met during her first visit to St Petersburg in the 1843–4 opera season and with whom he was to remain on terms of close intimacy until his death in 1883. Whether or not he was her lover has led to a great deal of speculation, but it is characteristic of a certain contrariness in his nature that he should also have been on very amicable terms with Pauline’s husband, Louis Viardot. For the provenance of the Sketches this second relationship is more important, because Louis Viardot and Turgenev were not only in love with the same woman, but they were also in love with hunting, and it is very likely that a little collection of hunting memoirs entitled Souvenirs de chasses which Louis Viardot published in 1846 gave Turgenev the idea for his own work.

Other Russian writers had, of course, written about the peasantry – Radishchev, Pushkin, Gogol – and there were also such European writers as George Sand and Maria Edgeworth whom Turgenev could have taken as models. Strictly speaking, however, his Sketches are not modelled on anything save his own experience. He wrote most of them while he was outside Russia between 1847 and 1851, either while travelling in Europe or during a period spent on the Viardot estate of Courtavenel in the French countryside. The fact that he was drawing on memory may account for the brilliant lustre, so evocative and even nostalgic, that surrounds the best of them. Equally, perhaps, it may be that some of the luxuriance of the countryside about Courtavenel shines through the richness of the nature descriptions. In any case, a degree of trial and error accompanied their composition. They grew out of the success of ‘Khor and Kalinych’ and the fact that his mother failed to provide him with adequate means. While writing them he was also busy pursuing a career as a dramatist – a career that culminated in 1850 with the writing of his only important play, the five-act comedy A Month in the Country, after which he abandoned the theatre for good. These Sketches, therefore, are not all of a piece. In some respects they are occasional pieces, experiments in a particular kind of portraiture, tracts for the times cast in the mould of literature, trial sketches for his future work as a novelist. The order that he finally chose for them (the order followed in this translation) does not observe a strict chronology and can be considered evidence for supposing that he never regarded them as truly completed. Despite this, they have a certain stylistic cohesion as well as common ground for their content and they acquired soon after their first appearance their reputation as masterpieces which occupy a very special place in Russian literature.

‘Khor and Kalinych’ illustrates many of their most characteristic features. It introduces the author in the role that he is to assume throughout his work – the role, that is, of intelligent, interested but uncommitted observer. The observation has two discernible aspects to it: there is the lucid, clear-cut, pictorial aspect contributed by Turgenev the writer and artist; and there is what might be called the sociological aspect, which involves a Turgenev who cannot help being a member of the nobility, of the landowning class, and who to that extent is both a stranger in the world of the peasants and a frankly curious observer anxious to describe this world to his readers. For fear of censorship and no doubt for reasons of taste Turgenev does not attempt to lay undue emphasis on the fact of serfdom, but the propagandist element in his portraits of the two peasants, Khor (the polecat) and Kalinych, is clearly discernible. They can be said to represent differing types both of personality and, loosely speaking, of literary portraiture. Such differentiation serves not only to emphasize the individual human qualities in the two peasants but also anticipates Turgenev’s later interest in the division of human beings into those who are by nature predominantly Hamlet-like and those who are predominantly Quixotic (in his lecture of 1860). Apart, though, from laying stress on the intelligence of both the peasants, on their individuality as well as their ‘typical’ differences, this first Sketch also illustrates what is, in general, Turgenev’s common attitude – so far, at least, as these Sketches are concerned – towards the nobility. On these grounds alone there is good reason for supposing that the tendentiousness in these Sketches is rather more anti-establishment than overtly pro-peasantry.

‘Khor and Kalinych’ also sheds light on such common features of peasant life as the ‘eagles’ who exploit the peasant women, the itinerant scythe traders and the strict hierarchy that governs the relationship between Khor and his family, despite the good-natured bantering between Khor and his son Fedya. Naturally Turgenev’s interest in Khor’s character and family life is matched by an equivalent curiosity on Khor’s part; their mutual ignorance is sufficient comment in itself on the division which exists between master and peasant. Such comments as Turgenev’s about the conviction, derived from his talk with Khor, ‘that Peter the Great was predominantly Russian in his national characteristics’, or Khor’s caginess when Turgenev taxes him on the subject of purchasing his freedom are further reminders of the divisive half-truths, even illusions, which make communication and understanding between the classes so difficult. In other words, Turgenev’s conviction that the Russian peasantry can be used as an argument in favour of Westernism seems to be as much special pleading based on ignorance or first impressions as is Khor’s apprehension that he would tend to lose his individuality when he became free. It is rare, in fact, for Turgenev to attempt to argue or, in a strict sense, converse with the peasants; he is content to prompt them into speaking about themselves, framing the encounter and recorded speech with passages of commentary or nature description. The fact that most of the Sketches are offered as brief, summery episodes tends to set in relief the ephemeral, not to say fleeting, manner of Turgenev’s encounter with the peasants and to make of them creations of a particular moment, with little identity beyond a nickname; their patronymics, like their parentage, have been obliterated in the anonymity of their servile condition. The framework of the peasant encounters, then, tends to objectivize and simultaneously to distance. It is a distancing, of course, which usually has the effect of making the encounter doubly significant, as though a lyric poem had been born of an anecdote, a work of art from a snapshot. But the difference, let it not be forgotten, is really due to ignorance.

The simple, almost anecdotal charm of the first Sketch is followed by the more explicitly condemnatory tone of ‘Yermolay and the Miller’s Wife’ (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847). Zverkov’s attitude towards the peasantry, especially in regard to Arina, is the nub of this episode. The reader is not explicitly asked to contrast Turgenev’s attitude to Yermolay with Zverkov’s treatment of Arina, but this is the most likely moral to be drawn: it lays bare at one stroke the inhumanity of the system. Arina seems to have been based on fact, for Turgenev’s mother apparently treated one of her maidservants in a similar fashion. Yermolay, Turgenev’s frequent hunting companion, is also drawn from life – a serf, Afanasy Alifanov, belonging to one of Turgenev’s neighbours. Turgenev purchased his freedom and later gave material help to his family (though Yermolay is not endowed with a family in this Sketch). Descendants of Alifanov were reported as still living at Spasskoye in 1955.

‘Raspberry Water’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848) is a fine example of the distancing manner which Turgenev as observer-narrator employs in describing his encounters with the peasantry. An episode, no more, it illustrates through the story of Stepushka, the reminiscences of Foggy and the fragmentary dialogue passages devoted to Vlas, the extremes of deprivation and extravagance co-existing in the serf system. In the end, of course, the tragedy of such injustice is what reverberates throughout the heat of the afternoon as well as in the laconic shorthand of the exchanges between Foggy and the luckless Vlas. The silence of the wretched Stepushka is the most terrible of mute reproaches to serfdom’s inhumanity. But ‘District Doctor’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848), albeit so different in its extended internal narrative and sentimental manner, can be said to articulate just as strongly the inherent injustice of the social divide. As an essay in first-person narration, it introduces the reader, if only tentatively, into the milieu of the genteel, impoverished nobility which is to figure quite prominently in later Sketches. Here the character of the district doctor with the improbably awful name is too thin and close to caricature for the story to have any of the tragicomic impact of the Shchigrovsky Hamlet’s tale.

Radilov’s dilemma, though similarly emotional, has in ‘My Neighbour Radilov’ (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847) a more complex ethical meaning. Inexplicit as an issue in the story but essential for its understanding is the fact that the Orthodox Church proscribed marriage between a husband and his sister-in-law, which in Radilov’s case meant that he was not permitted to marry Olga. The complication of her supposed envy towards her sister and Radilov’s secretive, if outwardly, bland character (totally devoid of the trivial passions that commonly beset Russian landowners, as Turgenev amusingly enumerates them) suggests some of the hidden tensions and tragedies present in the life of the poorer nobility. They scarcely compare, however, with the more explicit problems raised by Farmer Ovsyanikov (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847), a figure who by social standing and inclination has a role roughly similar to Turgenev’s in his observation of the life around him. Pithy, strong-minded and wise, Ovsyanikov is an ideal channel for conveying critical attitudes towards serfdom without courting the danger of censorship. An eighteenth-century personality who admires the past while remaining clear-eyed about the beneficial and negative aspects of the present, he is, in terms of characterization, among the most fully drawn and vivid of the types depicted in the Sketches, even though he does no more than sit and talk. ‘Lgov’ (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847) offers two equally vivid portraits, those of the pretentious hunter Vladimir with his injured chin and forefinger and Old Knot (Suchok), the peasant who had been given a range of fatuous employments and names at the whims of his various masters and mistresses. As a whole, this story is a brilliant account of a disastrous duck-shooting expedition that simultaneously exposes the disastrous effects of arbitrary power, whether of man over man or man over nature.

The realism of Turgenev’s manner, in the sense that it respects the observed fact or in the more special sense that it so focuses the lens of the writer’s eye that it endows the subject with a dramatic immediacy, is splendidly illustrated by ‘Bezhin Lea’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1851). The opening description of a July day is an example of Turgenev at his most brilliant. A special magic haunts the picture that Turgenev offers us and suggests that such beautiful July days are a part of innocence, of boyhood, clothed in the magic of recollection. The reality, then, is the night in which Turgenev encounters the peasant boys around their fires, hears their stories of hauntings and darkenings of the sun. Serfdom here is not represented as a problem of social relationships; it is a presence, like the darkness, surrounding and enclosing the boys’ lives. The drama of flickering firelight and darkness has a quality of sorcery that illuminates the darkness and light in the boys’ minds, dramatically holds them in the writer’s eye, photographs them for ever for the reader’s gaze. Then, after the mystery of the night’s experience, comes the splendour of the morning and Turgenev’s always clear-minded insistence on the ephemerality of life with the announcement that Pavlusha had been killed in falling from a horse. The colour words, the visual richness, the simplicity of the encounter so magnificently recreated and the finely etched characterizations of the boys leave a residue of wonder.

Equally rich in descriptive detail is the story of Turgenev’s meeting with ‘Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands’ (The Contemporary, No. 3, 1851). Kasyan, supposedly an adherent of some unnamed religious sect, is one of the most remarkable peasant portraits in these Sketches. His quasi-biblical speech is the vehicle not only for a protest against the shedding of blood; it is also a means of expressing his own repudiation of established society in the name of that dream-world of folklore ‘where no leaves fall from the trees in winter, nor in the autumn neither, and golden apples do grow on silver branches and each man lives in contentment and justice with another’. But this Sketch, composed at a time when Turgenev’s proselytizing Westernism had been somewhat modified as a result of the Paris revolution in 1848, is not as explicit a plea for justice as is ‘Bailiff’ (The Contemporary, No. 10, 1847). ‘Bailiff’ was written in May and June of 1847, though the final place and date which Turgenev gave to it (Salzbrunn, in Silesia, July 1847) was his way of acknowledging agreement with the sentiments expressed by Belinsky in his famous ‘Letter to Gogol’. Belinsky, convalescing at Salzbrunn, wrote his letter in violent reaction against the obscurantist Slavophile ideas that Gogol had professed in a curious work entitled Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends. Turgenev was in Salzbrunn during part of Belinsky’s convalescence, and the latter’s plea for justice in Russian social and political life, as expressed in the ‘Letter to Gogol’, later became Turgenev’s sole religious and political credo. Of all the Sketches ‘Bailiff’, with its exquisitely savage portrait of the foppish tyrant Penochkin and its equally acute study of his bailiff, contains by far the most outspoken attack on the exploitation of the peasantry.

The following three Sketches provide further examples of such exploitation through exposing the disguises used by landowners to conceal their tyranny. The creation of ‘offices’ of the kind described in ‘The Office’ (The Contemporary, No. 10, 1847) proved popular with Russian landowners as a means of controlling their peasantry through a bureaucratic hierarchy of clerks and petty officials. The opportunity for bribery and corruption in such circumstances is amply demonstrated by this Sketch, in which the narrator’s role is made so neutral by his eavesdropping that the whole story has a dramatic, documentary realism to it. This is not the only example of the narrator as eavesdropper, but in this case the non-participant role clearly involves a withdrawal of sympathy. In ‘Loner’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848), by contrast, the portrait of the giant peasant forester with the superb physique and fearsome reputation is projected with the greatest sympathy. This is a rare instance of Turgenev as narrator actually being admitted into the home-life of the peasantry. The scene of poverty he encounters in the peasant’s hut, as well as in the suppressed but, for all that, very real distress of the motherless daughter and baby, has a poignant and vivid strength to it. The fact that the powerful peasant should be single-mindedly pursuing his guardianship of the forest to the detriment of other peasants, though no doubt in the interests of true conservationism, is tragically ironic. The actual beneficiary of the Loner’s zeal is absent from the picture. Not so in the case of ‘Two Landowners’, which provides more evidence of the sickeningly callous treatment meted out by landowners to their serfs. Possibly because this Sketch was so critical, Turgenev did not publish it originally in The Contemporary but included it among his collection of Sketches when they were first published as a separate edition in 1852.

The crudities of Russian provincial society figure prominently in the next Sketches (both published first in The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848). Here the tone, particularly in ‘Lebedyan’, yields to a mocking, sardonic manner which highlights the rumbustious, if colourful, coarseness and double-dealing of the provincial horse fair. Khlopakov’s reiteration of his supposedly funny nonsense words compares ironically with the unctuous pieties of the unscrupulous horse-dealer Chernobay: Turgenev’s observant, tight-lipped description of both types is masterly in its sarcasm. As for ‘Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew’ this light-hearted Sketch may confound the reader by the gradual reversal of sympathies which occurs when the boorish, insensitive nephew returns to his aunt’s house. Turgenev uses the work as much as anything as a vehicle for pouring scorn on the artistic standards and tastes of his day.

Despite the sardonic tone of some of them, the value of these Sketches as socio-political tracts for the times hardly needs to be emphasized. Their effect was such that they made a very real contribution to the movement for emancipating the serfs after the Crimean War. Yet they are probably better understood nowadays as one of the stages in Turgenev’s development as a writer, revealing some of the themes and motifs which recur so frequently in his work and imbue it with a significance as much philosophical as social or political. ‘Death’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848), for example, implies clearly enough that there is another kind of injustice apart from the injustice of social inequality. The isolation of the human personality in relation to nature and eternity exercised Turgenev more deeply, in the final analysis, than did the social or political issues of his time. ‘Death’ illustrates his concern for the way peasants die, with no particular emphasis laid on the morbid aspects of such a subject. It illustrates even more clearly the compassion that he feels for the wretched Avenir, the ‘eternal student’, whose sensitive, enthusiastic nature proves to be as superfluous in life as it is in the context of Russian society. Viewed in relation to its essentially ephemeral character, as Turgenev undoubtedly viewed it, the human personality becomes valuable for the beauty which it exhibits in life.

Beauty is the theme of ‘Singers’ (The Contemporary, No. 11, 1850) in the sense that it is the beauty of Yakov’s singing that so touches the hearts of his listeners that he is universally acknowledged to be the winner of the competition. It is, of course, a fleeting beauty. Turgenev chanced upon it in taking refuge from the heat of the day and refused to idealize the episode by omitting the drunken scene at the end. Apart from depicting the peasants as endowed with a culture of their own, this Sketch seizes upon a moment of epiphany in which Yakov’s singing and the tearful desperation of the boy’s final cries seem to embrace the full range of peasant heartache.

Heartache, along with a gradual deepening of the emotional content of the Sketches, characterizes both ‘Pyotr Petrovich Karataev’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1847) and ‘Meeting’, if from wholly different social points of view. Karataev’s ruinous love for the peasant girl Matryona, offered as an internal narrative, echoes Radilov’s dilemma and anticipates in some ways Chertopkhanov’s, though Karataev is in every respect the most deeply affected and the most articulate of those members of the landowning class who fall victim to serfdom’s rigid division between the classes. An ordinary but companionable fellow, he finds that his hopeless love for Matryona turns him into both heartbroken flotsam and deceived lover whose feelings of protest and revenge have echoes in the soliloquies of Hamlet. ‘Meeting’ (The Contemporary, No. 11, 1850) deals explicitly with peasant emotion, observed from outside, as it were, and is the only attempt Turgenev made in his Sketches to describe such emotions among the peasantry. The glitter of the natural scene at the beginning reflects and sets in relief the expectations of the peasant girl awaiting her lover, just as the final breath of autumn is an orchestration of her tears, but for once the touch is a shade too sentimental, the artlessness betrays a shade too much of the artifice that contributed to its making.

‘Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849) is a study in the Hamletism of Turgenev’s generation. As an anatomy of provincial society, the opening description of the dignitary’s arrival and the ensuing dinner is one of the most uproariously sardonic descriptions to be found in Turgenev’s work. The anonymous Hamlet’s subsequent recital of misfortunes and misalliances mixes the tragic and the comic in a narrative that explores what he refers to as ‘the extreme limit of unhappiness’. By the time he sticks his tongue out at himself in the mirror it is clear that the tragedy of his superfluity reflects the tragic loss of illusions and fond hopes experienced by Turgenev’s generation as a whole. The Hamlet’s preoccupation with self has comic aspects to it, but his final reconciliation is in its own way as bitter an acceptance of social inequality and complete obliteration of individuality as is the peasant’s subservience to his master.

The independence of the ‘loner’, of the man, no matter what his social status or role, who opts for such freedom as he can obtain within the limits of the system evidently appealed to Turgenev and no figure in the Sketches exemplifies such independence better than Chertopkhanov. He made his first appearance in ‘Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849). His dashing, colourful personality, so naturally inclined to protect the weak and vulnerable, as he shows in the patronage which he extends to the unfortunate Nedopyuskin, has an eccentric side to it that may antagonize as much as it can endear. In general the issue of serfdom here slips into the background and is replaced by a study of bachelorhood. The curious little ménage cultivated by the two bachelors, Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin, has an idyllic appeal. It seems, among these Sketches, as nearly ideal a condition as can be imagined. But the story of Chertopkhanov was not destined to end there. In 1872 Turgenev published a sequel ‘The End of Chertopkhanov’ (The Herald of Europe, No. 11) in which he not only dispensed with the device of narrator but he also adopted a looser, chronicle manner in telling the story of Chertopkhanov’s last years and death. In style and content, therefore, this work scarcely seems to form an organic part of the Sketches. It is the longest of them and among the most pessimistic. Divided into short chapters, it traces the slow decline of Chertopkhanov after his abandonment by Masha and the death of his bosom friend. Though the wonder horse Malek Adel becomes the treasured companion of his bachelorhood, the doubts in Chertopkhanov’s mind surrounding the ‘second’ Malek Adel seem to reinforce a sense that his eccentricity, like his fanatical pride, has a self-destructive edge to it. The story is noteworthy for its sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish horse-dealer Moshel Leiba, a second beneficiary of Chertopkhanov’s love of justice, yet the portrayal of the central figure himself as doomed by his own self-delusion and doubts fails on the whole to sustain his tragic image to a successful conclusion.

No Sketch is more poignant or beautiful than ‘Living Relic’. It first appeared in 1874 in a collection of stories published to raise funds for famine victims in the Samara Province. The lucidly simple portrait of the peasant woman Lukeria who religiously endures the long travail of her illness evokes the image of a saint enduring a solitary martyrdom. The comparison with Joan of Arc does not aggrandize her fate. Lukeria’s humble, philosophical acceptance of misfortune reflects Turgenev’s pessimistic view, increasingly marked in his later years, that life must involve such submission to fate. This readiness to submit forms the crux of another Sketch first published in 1874, ‘Clatter of Wheels’. Though the narrator’s fears prove to be unfounded at the moment of crisis, the Sketch has a nice blend of humour and tension interlaced with characteristic passages of nature description. Finally, ‘Forest and Steppe’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849), which was always the concluding piece in the several editions of the Sketches that appeared during Turgenev’s lifetime, reminds us that the hunter’s milieu was the forest regions, not the ‘limitless, enormous steppe no eye can encompass’.

The Appendix contains two fragments first published in 1964 which in their finished form would probably have proved to be as outspokenly critical as any of the completed Sketches. In their existing form the fragments are interesting for their terse and pungent thumbnail portraits of two different types of despotic landowner. ‘The Russian German’ perhaps also helps to explain something that may seem puzzling to a twentieth-century reader – namely the ease with which Turgenev was able to range far and wide on his hunting trips. That he had so little fear of trespassing is one mark of the time-span that separates his age from ours. It is also, of course, the hallmark of these hunting memoirs of his in which he, the footloose, supposedly free-ranging hunter, chooses for the greater part to depict the equally footloose, supposedly unattached peasantry, ‘superfluous’ after their fashion within the serf system. They are his hunter’s ‘prey’; but they are not the ‘sitting ducks’ that the landowners are once they come within range of Turgenev’s hunter’s eye. The latter, immured in their homes as in their internal narratives, are picked off more easily and more wickedly and with greater understanding than are the fleeting portrayals of the peasantry, so often caught casually but brilliantly on the wing.

Although these Sketches belong to an age that is now quite remote, the wryly humorous detachment, visual honesty and poetic sensibility with which Turgenev endowed them have served to maintain the freshness and distinction of their literary appeal. In his novels, especially Fathers and Sons, he was no doubt to achieve greater things, but his Sketches were his first major achievement. He was aware both of their value and their imperfections, as we know from a letter that he wrote to his friend Annenkov in 1852:

I am glad that this book has come out; it seems to me that it will remain my mite cast into the treasure-chest of Russian literature, to use the phraseology of the schoolbook … Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it’s not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the whole book.

Turgenev’s verdict, though understandably erring on the critical side, has proved to be a just one. A translator can only hope that he has been able to reveal the justice of it in his translation, despite the many temptations placed in his way to oversalt or undercook the poetry, simplicity, irony and beauty of the original Russian.

Ivan Turgenev

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM

TRANSLATED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
RICHARD FREEBORN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

PENGUIN CLASSICS

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM

THE BEGINNING

Introduction

Ivan Turgenev

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM

TRANSLATED WITH ANINTRODUCTION AND NOTES BYRICHARD FREEBORN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

PENGUIN CLASSICS

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM

THE BEGINNING

Introduction

TRANSLATED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
RICHARD FREEBORN