Customer Reviews

Sketches from a Hunter's Album: The Complete Edition (Penguin Classics)

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It's taken me until now to get to Sketches From A Hunter's Album. Now I have finished it and now I am grieving. It will stay in my nonlending collection so I can savor it even after the surprise has gone. It's like losing a friend.

Turgenev calls these 'sketches' rather than stories. It's a good distinction. More story writers should concentrate on their sketch pads. The sketches are of places and people in the rural south of Russia in the 1840s. Each is strung thematically on Turgenev's wandrings through the countryside while hunting for game birds. Each begins with a mention that he was hunting in a certain place. He goes into lovely thoughtful and surprising descriptions of the woods or marsh, the sky, the smells, the sounds, the light. Even in translation, these are exquisite. He speaks of shifting light shining through the leaves onto the forest floor, or unbreatheable noonday heat, or changing skies at the advent of a storm, a dawn, or a sunset; he calls up moments from your own life that you thought could not be shared with anyone who wasn't there and he makes you relive those moments as if he had been there with you.

For anyone who has spent time out of doors, these little Aldo Leopold nature essays standing alone would be reason enough to read the 'Sketches', but these are just hors d'œuvre to his descriptions of the persons he meets while hunting. When sketching people, Turgenev does gracefully what Dickens tried to do and did clumsily; that is, he describes the physical characteristics of a person and gives you a fully formed description of their character as well, and he does this without sounding forced and without showing himself. (And you will burst out laughing at the sudden recognition that, indeed, someone does look 'like a root vegetable'.)

"Sketches" was published twice in Turgenev's lifetime and in the second edition he added to it. In the earlier sketches, Turgenev brings a character to life in a description; the character may speak a few words, and disappear from the scene, as people do in real life, leaving the reader to speculate what became of him. Yet, Turgenev has given us enough insight into the character that we think we know what probably happened next, and so the story is complete. These are elegant Aristotelian constructs with the action taking place offstage, and, oh elegance! with the final action taking place in the reader's imagination after the story has ended. If my description leaves you wondering, read them! (Would that I could spur you to act as Turgenev spurs his readers to think. Ah, but it's too much... .) This is what Turgenev does. He starts you thinking, but requires you to complete the story. In the later sketches Turgenev is just as deft in his descriptions, but perhaps to satisfy the market or his editors he adopts a more plot driven model. These later contributions can more truly be called stories rather than sketches. They are equally well-crafted, but they demand less of the reader. Curiously, they give us less as well.

The hunter's travels theme gives the collection an interrelatedness, almost like a picaresque novel. As in Huckleberry Finn or Don Quixote, neither the author nor the protagonist directly express opinions, but as stories accumulate the reader acquires the author's strong politicized view. We meet the aristocrats and peasants of rural Russia. The serf-holding system had been 'liberalized' in the early 19th century, but it is revealed as the unnamed slavery it was. Landlords control peasants' rights to marry; they name the persons to fill regional conscription quotas; they assign agricultural and residential alotments; and thoughtless and uncaring aristocrats use these powers carelessly or maliciously to destroy lives. Liberal aristocrats fare no better than traditional feudalists, as Turgenev details social reformers' well-meaning disasters which beggar both for the peasants and the bumbling aristocrats who direct them.

America often forgets that its civil war was part of a European pandemic of peasant revolts driven by the extended logic of the Enlightenment. As masters and slaves in the United States were struggling with the immorality of a divine order handed down from a prior age, the masters and servants in Europe did the same. The 1840s, 50s, and 60s were tumultuous times in central and eastern Europe. Turgenev, arrested and exiled in 1852 because of the 'Sketches', has an historical place akin to the American abolitionists of the same day, however, unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, Turgenev draws his characters in three dimensions with humanity, with love and understanding even when he does not forgive them their moral failings. The 'Sketches' would be an interesting book to teach alongside Huckleberry Finn.

Turgenev effectively invents a new form -- the literary sketch -- to impart a new kind of content. What is brilliant about these sketches which are in part nature meditation and in part biographical sketch is how Turgenev allows each character to speak for themselves. As a result we feel like we are hearing something we have never heard before -- the natural voice of the people. By allowing people to speak for themselves Turgenev gives us a truer and more genuine idea of how people -- serf and gentry -- really think and relate. Each sketch begins with a detailed description of the natural surroundings he is walking through and these descriptions give us insight into Turgenev's cast of mind which is infintely receptive, and discerning, even romantic and delicate at times as when he describes staring up through the forest canopy and imagining he is staring up at the world from beneath a vast body of water. These magnficent introductions set the mood for the character sketch to come. When he meets a serf it is as if he is merely continuing his communion with nature for the serfs live at one with the land. When he meets one of the gentry, however, and passes time in their company he feels removed from the natural settings and people he so values. It is a fascinating and very subtle technique but Turgenev makes the landowners seem like unnatural creatures who are disturbing the natural order. Though he is one of the gentry himself Turgenev hunts with the serfs , he values their company and conversation, and he values what they know. He knows them as individuals not just as serfs and so we too come to know them as individuals, each with their own personality and ideas about life and story to tell. Since we know these sketches are from real life we listen more carefully to them than we would if they were mere inventions; real life has a resonance that fiction does not. Given the choice of spending the day with a either serf or a landowner Turgenev would choose the serf. The serfs have not received an education and their opinions are often shaped by superstition, and yet it is these very superstitions that make them such colorful characters, the gentry may be educated but they are full of self-importance and affectations and see everything through the limited scope of their own self-interest which is merely another form of ignorance. Turgenev's most effective weapon is not bitter invective but irony. He never comes out and says serfdom is bad because the landowners are in some cases such vile creatures that there is no need to. By simply quoting them and describing their manners and actions Turgenev allows the landowners to do a fine job at condemning themselves.

The most profound sketch to my mind is "Yermolay and the Millers Wife" which relates the harsh treatment doled out to a beautiful serf woman merely because she wants to get married, and a close second is "Bezhin Lea" about a group of boys telling ghost stories around a fire as they tend a herd of horses grazing at night. The former sketch pefectly conveys what absolute power the landowners have over every aspect of the serfs life and the latter sketch perfectly conveys how the serfs pass down their own particular brand of wisdom from one generation to the next. Perhaps the most famous sketch however is "Khor and Kalinych" which juxtaposes two kinds of serfs--one resigned to his lot and the other who despite his status as serf finds his own kind of freedom by wandering the countryside. "Kasyan and the Beautiful Lands" is perhaps the most unusual story as it presents a sage-like man who speaks as though he were a living oracle. Deprived of education the serfs remain in thrall not only to the landowners but to ignorance as well; nonetheless there is a beauty and tragic grace in the voices of these serfs that remains in memory long after you have read these sketches. The sketches are complex and layered enough to invite you back to them again and again.

The biggest joy of the sketches is their casualness. Nothing is ever overly stated or stated in black and white but everything nonetheless appears clear as day. It seems at times as if Turgenev is the only enlightened soul in Russia and yet he is absolutely civil even when with a pernicious landowner because he innately knows what is right and he trusts that we know as well. Turgenev reminds me of Thoreau in his devotions which are equally divided between nature and the forwarding of liberal ideas. Though Pushkin and Lermontov both came before him Turgenev was the first Russian writer to achieve fame outside of Russia. Fathers and Sons is considered his masterpiece but these sketches stand as something unique in all of literature.

I don't like short stories, never have and I don't know why. I had to read this collection for a course and found it pretty good. The professor told us that this was Hemingway's favorite book which Hemingway had read over and over. In fact, Hemingway modeled some of his own stories on those here, particularly the Hemingway stories where nothing happens except someone might make a pot of coffee. But let's face it, these are not so much stories (narrations of events in time) as sketches of characters. Any plot would be too much plot and would interfer with the general effect, which is to show us the life and times of Russians before the liberation of the serfs. I liked "The Singers", as other reviewer have, but the true masterpiece, worth the entire price of the book, is "Living Relic." Nothing happens in that story except we learn again the beauty and strength of the human spirit and in the process the redemptive nature of true literature.

Hemingway said, "Tolstoy wrote the greatest books, but Turgenev was the greatest writer." That doesn't really make sense, but it is high praise of a genius, by a genius. Hemingway's favorite story is "Rattle of Wheels." I love it, too. But my favorite in here is "The Singers." Two lines that resonated with me from this book (the first one an introvert like me can relate to). 1)"`I, too, have been corroded by introspection.'" and 2)"`One needs people, if only to have somebody to yell at.'" As you can see, from those lines, these aren't always the sunniest of stories (though some of them are), but they are among the best ever written.

In giving this book only three stars, I'm not rating Turgenev but rather the translation. I'm not a translator myself, I'm sure it's very difficult rendering dialogue from another time and place, etc., etc. but I finally couldn't abide the translator's choice in this case to render the voices of nineteenth century Russian peasants in Cockney (or other English) slang.

Examples: "He was a right pain to his peasant girls." "They felt right idiots." "He's not a gent, is he?" "Help us, mate." "Judge for yourself, mate." "He's the soul of kindness, he is." "Gavrila comprehended-like how to get out of the wood." The use of "'cos" for "because." The use of "gotta"--"And I've gotta tell you this."

And what was for me the last straw, in the story Bezhin Lea, "Cor!" and "Cor, stone me!"

If you like this kind of thing, you'll love the book. For Russian lit in translation, give me Constance Garnett (and her Edwardian diction--which works so well, perhaps because it seems natural in contrast to the forced quality on display in "Sketches") or else the current team of Pevear and Volokhonsky.

As the previous reader from Philadelphia said, Turgenev's "Sketches" blows all the other writers out of the water. I'm afraid this review could do Amazon.com some degree of harm, since Turgenev's little book makes all other short-story collections superfluous in comparison! The 25 stories constitute a profoundly spiritual exaltation of the Russian peasant. A deep and powerful expression of life, love, and the universal traits of human goodness course through this book and make it an irrestible masterpiece. The story "Living Relic" is more beautiful and spiritual than any other story I have ever read, the story of a woman with a faith stronger and more touching, perhaps, than many a figure in the Bible. This book is such a powerful portrait of the nineteenth-century Russian serf and it's author such a devoted champion of them and such an enemy of base human servitude and slavery, that Turgenev was arrested and forced into exile as a result. The reader of this spectacular book will not regret purchasing it.

This is a book of short, accessible stories which give some idea why people who read a lot call the Russian writers great.

Taken separately, these stories seem sentimental portraits of the Russian countryside, its serfs and lords. Pretty girls, amusing drunks, and the scent of grain and dirt and isolated village life. These stories, printed separately in magazines, were part of how Turgenev built his literary reputation. But taken as pieces of a whole--when these stories were collected and published together in 1852 they got Turgenev arrested for his depiction of the vicious cruelties perpetuated under the Tsarist regime. In Turgenev's day, the Russian land laws badly needed reform, and these were the stories that told it as it was.

There are one or two clunkers in here--stories where the idea or the characters doesn't quite make it. Maybe in another collection of stories they could carry their weight--but not when they've been printed next to stories of the quality of "Khor and Kalinych" and "Bezhin Lea." But this seems almost a ridiculous criticism to give of a book which, overall, contains such power and human meaning.

This is a beautiful and disturbing book. 5 stars. No quibbling with that.

Chekov and Mausappant?? Hemingway and Carver?? James Joyce's Dubliners? Great short story writers and great short story collections are definitely part of these writers legends. But after I read this awesome book of related short stories and realized it was written in 1852... my jaw just dropped..wow.. thought provoking fiction with a desire to make a differance and perfect epiphanies and an ultra modern kinda vibe.. way way ahead of its time..great

Simply, one of the greatest book ever written. Turgenev's style is wonderfully evocative, and yet it has not an ounce of sentimentalism: its depictions of natural landscapes are incredibly lucid, almost detached, in a sense; today, we could say his writing has a "zen-like" clarity. His human character are little parts of this whole, but Turgenev's panteism has nothing of the desperate, ferociously ironic pessimism of, say, Thomas Hardy; his vision is perfectly impartial, and yet sympathetic: each of his characters appears in his fundamental, intact dignity of human being. I'm not myself a starry-eyed dreamer: but reading this book, with its wonderfully easy and aimless wanderings, is like psychoterapy; you can't get out of it but feeling calmly hyper-oxygenated, as it were; you can't read this book but thinking that this man, Turgenev, mysteriously understood what it is like to be fellow sharers of this strange place, Earth, and of this strange thing, life. If something like "occidental buddhism" does exist, this book is a lesson in it.

The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas I was, in the eyes not only of most Western Europeans of the time but also of sizable sectors of the Russian intellectual class, most often seen as being a hopelessly backward and inefficient state still clinging to baseless Medieval ideals and systems; by far, the continued lingering on of serfdom, with all its inherent hardship and inhumanity, proved to be the most revolting aspect of the imperial machine at the time. Indeed, the vast majority of Russians at this time belonged to the body of serfs obligated to render service to the influential landowning nobility, and subsequently enjoyed neither freedom of movement, a standard of living above subsistence, nor any political rights. Although a broad statement attributing general destitution or suffering to all Russian serfs of the period would be grossly in error, as certain industrious serfs were able to live comfortably, the total exclusion of the masses from government and the autocratic nature of the Czar's power aroused much indignation amongst Western kingdoms such as England, where parliamentary measures had already greatly reduced the authority of the monarch; similarly, Russian intellectuals, writers, and reformers took sympathy for the oppressed serfs, and hoped to ameliorate their condition in order to boost the low productivity of Russian agriculture; Ivan Turgenev, author of "Sketches from a Hunter's Album," was one such concerned novelist. Nicholas the I, an excessively conservative Czar who could tolerate no writings that stood to alter Russian's perceptions of serfdom, and thus endanger the rigid social strata upon which Nicholas structured his dominion, ruthlessly censored such works and drove numerous authors, Turgenev included, into exile abroad. While "Sketches from a Hunter's Album" contains no overt cries for revolution or social change, Turgenev was clearly a noble concerned by, and disgusted with, the repressive institution of serfdom; by humanizing the serfs through his various short tales, dealing with every aspect of serf life from marriage to superstition, Turgenev vied to alter his fellow Russian's prejudiced conceptions of the serfs, and thus achieve some betterment of their lot. Similarly explosive in the eyes of the conservative Czar where Turgenev's commentaries upon the arbitrary nature of the landowning aristocracy, as well as his more liberal attitude toward social mobility.
In exploring and elucidating upon the vast chasm of difference, both material and mental, that stood between many Russian serfs, Turgenev appropriately compares two radically differing serfs, Khor and Kalynich. Kalynich, an intensely obedient and loyal servant to his and Khor's noble superior, Polyutkin, lives an exceedingly plain and subsistence-level life; caught up in his idealism, he is all too satisfied to dedicate himself to Polyutkin and keep content with his meager lot. Talkative and genial, Kalynich enjoys a special gift in handling nature; moreover, he proudly and happily completes those tasks demanded of him by the landowners. In sharp contrast, Khor, a much wiser and experienced serf, who lives with true understanding of the world and its ways, possess significantly greater material wealth and standing; indeed, he exists virtually independent of the serf community or Polyutkin, save the exorbitant rent required of him by his lord. More reticent than Kalynich, Khor clearly understands the parasitic and detrimental role of Polyutkin, as well as society's generally exploitative attitude toward those of his standing; this is amply evidenced by his tale of the yearly exploitative sale of farm equipment. By laying bare these two diametrically differing figures, Turgenev casts aside the popular conception that the serfs where essentially all the same, living in destitute conditions and unawares of their pathetic situation; moreover, Turgenev establishes these two men as individuals, greatly endearing them and their sufferings upon the reader, who is able to sympathize more effectively with a particular man than an entire social class. Not only are the serfs with whom Turgenev comes into contact with made real and human, they are imbued with numerous nobles and endearing qualities; many speak few yet say much, possess congenial spirits, exhibit prodigious daring, and often live life with keen common sense and appreciation of their lot in contrast with that of their lords. Particularly telling of this noble peasant spirit is Pavlusha, a young peasant boy whom Turgenev observes while finding shelter in a field; clearly a leader to his young companions, Pavlusha displays immense daring in rushing into the night to check the status of the horses, despite the foreboding atmosphere created by the boys' recanting of their innocent, earthy spirit- and ghost-inhabited, peasant myths. When he later learns of Pavlusha's death, Turgenev is genuinely sorry to hear the news, confirming his enormous capacity to respect the serfs as human beings. Yet, Turgenev is himself shocked and confused by the peasants' often ambiguous feelings toward their emancipation. When asked, Khor confirms that he would prefer freedom to his limited bondage; yet, he stubbornly refuses to buy the freedom that is within his grasp. This paradoxical attitude could be explained by the serfs' horror at the idea of buying emancipation only to end up on the bottom rung of the landowning class, spat upon by those above them and unable to effectively compete. More likely, however, Khor's persistence in retaining his serfdom speaks to the weight of generations of tradition; most Russian serfs could look back upon innumerable generations of serfdom, and had begun to feel adequately secure and comfortable in their vassalage. Thus, Turgenev avoids i8nnacurate, heavy-handed, rhetoric of the "suffering of the masses" in favor of just and humane portraits of individual peasants, their values, beliefs, traditions, and families that serve not only to enlighten the reader as to the condition of the Russian masses at the time, but to hopefully arouse in contemporaries a sympathy for the serfs conducive to a reform of their status; this more-level headed, grass-roots, approach to social change certainly appears more effective than any blazing rhetoric from above could have been at the time.
Far from content with humanizing the Russian serfs, Ivan Turgenev could not simply resist the inclination to paint a contrastingly negative, though equally true, portrait of the Russian nobles that domineered over the lives of the masses. From the first, Polutykin, master to Khor and Kalynich, displays the arbitrary, greedy, and uncaring nature that is to dominate the attitude of the wealthy aristocracy throughout the novel; for no reason save his ability to do so, Polutykin annually increases Khor's rent, keeping him in submission. Equally telling not only of the nobles' fear and prejudices, but also of the advantage that education conveyed in this period of Russian history, is Mr. Zverkov's utter rage at the news that his servants-girl, Arina, planned not only to marry but had also learned to read and write, allowing her to advance herself somewhat; Zverkov, exhibiting the biases of the nobles, is unable to see the peasants as anything except treacherous and ungrateful wolves. More disturbingly is the behavior Marya Ilinichna, the owner of Matryona, with who Pyotr Karatev had fallen in love. Altgough Marya has no practical use for Matryona on her estates, she nonetheless insists upon playing God with the poor woman's life, refusing to condone her marriage and even going so far as to exile her rather than release her from service. Turgenev, with his sharp and biting analysis, grandly exposes the horrific nature of the landowning class as a whole, adding further weight to his unstated case for social change. So arbitrary and hurtful and institution as the aristocracy cannot defend itself from such brazen attack upon its exploitative behavior. Naturally, such denunciation of certain practices of the wealthy elite would have greatly disturbed Nicholas I, who relied upon the social system of serfdom and vassalage.
Turgenev produces further anathema, at least in the eyes of the Czar, in elucidating upon certain instances of social mobility and the mixing of the social classes. Pyotr Karatev, a minor landowner, is shown to fall madly in love with a mere servant-woman, Matryona; such a love would have been unthinkable to polite Russian society at the time, although Turgenev based the tale upon his own love for a woman of a lower social standing. Indeed, Matryona herself, who begins a life with Pyotr, becomes almost indistinguishable from others of higher social standing simply by her clothes. Such messages of general human equality would have been shocking to conservative Russians, who firmly saw the peasants as being lesser human beings. When Pyotr loses his estates and lands, being reduced to the state of working at an inn, he nonetheless finds happiness; such a loss of social standing accompanied by continued enjoyment of life would have proven alien to the Russian elite, who cherished their positions and saw them as the only means of fulfillment in life. Thus it is that Turgenev, through his short tales focusing on his hunting expeditions, tore away long-held prejudices toward the Russian peasantry, revealing them to be normal and often admirable human beings; similarly, he exposes the gross excess of many aristocrats, as well as their cruel treatment of their fellow men. With these portraits, Turgenev illustrates for his contemporaries the realities of Russian life, firmly believing that a sympathetic impulse to reform the plight of the serfs would naturally follow. In doing so, he incurred the wrath of the conservative Czar, but, more importantly, nurtured the seeds of reform that would one day help to ameliorate the lot of the Russian peasant.