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.