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.