Sketches from a Hunter's Album Read Online Free

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. 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 victimto 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.
    â€˜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