In 1872 Turgenev published a sequel ‘The End of Chertopkhanov’ (The Herald of Europe, No. 11) in which he not only dispensed with the device of narrator but he also adopted a looser, chronicle manner in telling the story of Chertopkhanov’s last years and death. In style and content, therefore, this work scarcely seems to form an organic part of the Sketches. It is the longest of them and among the most pessimistic. Divided into short chapters, it traces the slow decline of Chertopkhanov after his abandonment by Masha and the death of his bosom friend. Though the wonder horse Malek Adel becomes the treasured companion of his bachelorhood, the doubts in Chertopkhanov’s mind surrounding the ‘second’ Malek Adel seem to reinforce a sense that his eccentricity, like his fanatical pride, has a self-destructive edge to it. The story is noteworthy for its sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish horse-dealer Moshel Leiba, a second beneficiary of Chertopkhanov’s love of justice, yet the portrayal of the central figure himself as doomed by his own self-delusion and doubts fails on the whole to sustain his tragic image to a successful conclusion.

No Sketch is more poignant or beautiful than ‘Living Relic’. It first appeared in 1874 in a collection of stories published to raise funds for famine victims in the Samara Province. The lucidly simple portrait of the peasant woman Lukeria who religiously endures the long travail of her illness evokes the image of a saint enduring a solitary martyrdom. The comparison with Joan of Arc does not aggrandize her fate. Lukeria’s humble, philosophical acceptance of misfortune reflects Turgenev’s pessimistic view, increasingly marked in his later years, that life must involve such submission to fate. This readiness to submit forms the crux of another Sketch first published in 1874, ‘Clatter of Wheels’. Though the narrator’s fears prove to be unfounded at the moment of crisis, the Sketch has a nice blend of humour and tension interlaced with characteristic passages of nature description. Finally, ‘Forest and Steppe’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849), which was always the concluding piece in the several editions of the Sketches that appeared during Turgenev’s lifetime, reminds us that the hunter’s milieu was the forest regions, not the ‘limitless, enormous steppe no eye can encompass’.

The Appendix contains two fragments first published in 1964 which in their finished form would probably have proved to be as outspokenly critical as any of the completed Sketches. In their existing form the fragments are interesting for their terse and pungent thumbnail portraits of two different types of despotic landowner. ‘The Russian German’ perhaps also helps to explain something that may seem puzzling to a twentieth-century reader – namely the ease with which Turgenev was able to range far and wide on his hunting trips. That he had so little fear of trespassing is one mark of the time-span that separates his age from ours. It is also, of course, the hallmark of these hunting memoirs of his in which he, the footloose, supposedly free-ranging hunter, chooses for the greater part to depict the equally footloose, supposedly unattached peasantry, ‘superfluous’ after their fashion within the serf system. They are his hunter’s ‘prey’; but they are not the ‘sitting ducks’ that the landowners are once they come within range of Turgenev’s hunter’s eye. The latter, immured in their homes as in their internal narratives, are picked off more easily and more wickedly and with greater understanding than are the fleeting portrayals of the peasantry, so often caught casually but brilliantly on the wing.

Although these Sketches belong to an age that is now quite remote, the wryly humorous detachment, visual honesty and poetic sensibility with which Turgenev endowed them have served to maintain the freshness and distinction of their literary appeal. In his novels, especially Fathers and Sons, he was no doubt to achieve greater things, but his Sketches were his first major achievement. He was aware both of their value and their imperfections, as we know from a letter that he wrote to his friend Annenkov in 1852:

I am glad that this book has come out; it seems to me that it will remain my mite cast into the treasure-chest of Russian literature, to use the phraseology of the schoolbook… Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it’s not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the whole book.

Turgenev’s verdict, though understandably erring on the critical side, has proved to be a just one. A translator can only hope that he has been able to reveal the justice of it in his translation, despite the many temptations placed in his way to oversalt or undercook the poetry, simplicity, irony and beauty of the original Russian.

KHOR AND KALINYCH

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WHOEVER has happened to travel from Bolkhov County into the Zhizdra1 region will no doubt have been struck by the sharp differences between the nature of the people in the Oryol Province and those in Kaluga. The Oryol peasant is a man of little stature, round-shouldered, gloomy, given to looking at you from under his brows and used to living in miserable huts of aspen wood, working on the corvée2 principle, taking no part in trade, eating poorly and wearing bast shoes; whereas the Kaluga peasant, who pays quit-rent, is used to living in spacious fir huts, has a tall build, looks at you boldly and merrily with a clean, clear complexion, trades in grease and tar and wears boots on feast days. An Oryol village (I am talking about the eastern part of the Oryol Province) is usually situated among ploughed fields and close to a ravine which has somehow or other been transformed into a muddy pond. Apart from some wild broom, which is always ready to hand, and a couple of emaciated birches, there won’t be a tree visible for miles and hut will nestle against hut, the roofs strewn with rotten straw. A Kaluga village, on the other hand, will be surrounded for the most part by woodland; the huts, more independent of each other and straighter, are roofed with boards; the gates can be tightly closed, the wattle-fencing round the yard has not collapsed and fallen inwards to offer an open door to any passing pig. And for the hunter the Kaluga Province provides more in the way of game. In the Oryol Province the last areas of woodland and ‘plazas’* will disappear in five years or so, and there is no marshland whatever; while in the Kaluga Province wooded areas stretch for hundreds, and marshland for dozens, of miles, and that noble bird, the grouse, still thrives, the great-hearted snipe is plenteous and the noisy partridge both delights and frightens the hunter and his dog with its explosive flight from cover.

While out hunting in the Zhizdra region I became acquainted with a small Kaluga landowner, Polutykin, also a passionate hunter and, consequently, an excellent fellow.