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 antiestablishment 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.