Sketches from a Hunter's Album Read Online Free Page B

piece in the several editionsof 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

    W HOEVER has happened to travel from Bolkhov County into the Zhizdra 1 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
corvée 2
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