Sketches from a Hunter's Album

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM

IVAN TURGENEV, Russian novelist, was born in Oryol in 1818, and was the first Russian writer to enjoy an international reputation. Born into the gentry himself, and dominated in his boyhood by a tyrannical mother, he swore a ‘Hannibal’s oath’ against serfdom. After studying in Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin (1838–41), where he was influenced by German Idealism, he returned to Russia an ardent liberal and Westernist. He gained fame as an author with a series of brilliant, sensitive pictures of peasant life. Although he had also written poetry, plays and short stories, it was as a novelist that his greatest work was to be done. His novels are noted for the poetic ‘atmosphere’ of their country settings, the contrast between hero and heroine, and for the objective portrayal of heroes representative of stages in the development of the Russian intelligentsia during the period 1840–70. Exiled to his estate of Spasskoye (1852–5) because of his Sketches, he later wrote Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (1862), but was so disillusioned by the obtuse criticism which greeted this last work that he spent the rest of his life abroad at Baden-Baden (1862–70) and in Paris (1871–83). His last novels, Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877), lacked the balance and topicality of his earlier work. He died in Bougival, near Paris, in 1883.

RICHARD FREEBORN, Emeritus Professor of Russian Literature at the University of London, was previously Professor of Russian Studies at Manchester University, a visiting Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for ten years Hulme Lecturer in Russian at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated. He has published widely on Russian literature including Turgenev, A Study, The Rise of the Russian Novel and The Russian Revolutionary Novel, and was awarded a D.Lit. in 1984 by the University of London for his scholarly contributions to his subject. More recently he has completed a study of the famous Russian critic, Vissarion Belinskii. His other translations of Turgenev include Home of the Gentry (Penguin Classics), Rudin (Penguin Classics), First Love and Other Stories, A Month in the Country and Fathers and Sons. He has also translated Dostoevsky’s An Accidental Family (Podrostok).

IVAN TURGENEV

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM

TRANSLATED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
RICHARD FREEBORN

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The following stories were first published, in this translation, in
1967, under the same title: ‘Khor and Kalinych’, ‘Yermolay and the
Miller’s Wife’, ‘Bezhin Lea’, ‘Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands’,
‘Bailiff’, ‘Two Landowners’, ‘Death’, ‘Singers’, ‘Meeting’, ‘Hamlet
of the Shchigrovsky District’, ‘Living Relic’, ‘Clatter of Wheels’,
‘Forest and Steppe’, ‘The Russian German’ and ‘The Reformer and the
Russian German’.
Translation, Introduction and Notes copyright © Richard Freeborn, 1967

The following stories are first published in this translation,
1990: ‘Raspberry Water’, ‘District Doctor’, ‘My Neighbour Radilov’, ‘Farmer
Ovsyanikov’, ‘Lgov’, ‘The Office’, ‘Loner’, ‘Lebedyan’, ‘Tatyana
Borisovna and her Nephew’, ‘Pyotr Petrovich Karataev’, ‘Chertopkhanov
and Nedopyuskin’ and ‘The End of Chertopkhanov’.
Translation, Introduction and Notes copyright © Richard Freeborn, 1990
17

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EISBN: 9781101491423

CONTENTS

Introduction

Khor and Kalinych

Yennolay and the Miller’s Wife

Raspberry Water

District Doctor

My Neighbour Radilov

Farmer Ovsyanikov

Lgov

Bezhin Lea

Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands

Bailiff

The Office

Loner

Two Landowners

Lebedyan

Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew

Death

Singers

Pyotr Petrovich Karataev

Meeting

Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District

Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin

The End of Chertopkhanov

Living Relic

Clatter of Wheels

Forest and Steppe

Appendix

    The Russian German

    The Reformer and the Russian German

Notes

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.