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.