In the last post, we looked at a handful of books written in the naturalist style. Now I'd like to trace the realist and naturalist influence back to one of its sources, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev.
A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) by Ivan Turgenev
Nineteenth century Russian books have a reputation for being long, difficult works with far too many characters and impenetrable cultural contexts that might bewilder new readers. But if you're curious about Russian fiction, this collection is a good place to start. The individual stories in A Sportsman's Sketches are intense and entertaining, and taken together they form a satisfyingly unified whole. While this book is very much of its time, the sheer humanity of its characters cuts across cultural and temporal divides. Much of what you need to know about history to appreciate this collection can be found within the text itself.
Turgenev wrote about a feudal system in decline; landowners were once prosperous, but the glory days have long since passed. Many once thriving estates are crumbling and the descendants of wealthy landowning families find it increasingly difficult to manage their properties successfully--often because of their own shortsightedness.
Pastoral Russia is as much a character in these stories as anyone residing in its woods. Turgenev's vibrant descriptions of the natural world are some of the most lovely and engaging of their kind in all of literature, and his style and tone had a pragmatic as well as aesthetic advantage; by employing the naturalist device of the disinterested narrator, he was able to get provocative ideas past the censors to speak directly to his audience about the many injustices of Russia's feudal system.
Each piece is about the people the narrator meets and the stories he hears while hunting in the countryside. In "Raspberry Water", the narrator encounters two elderly men fishing, both former house serfs, who embody the region's fading past. Styopushka, a homeless former serf is humble and directionless, foraging for his daily bread and living on the former estate of a wealthy landowner through the charity of a peasant family who currently lives there. Tuman (Russian for "frog"), is a freed house serf who tells stories about his former master's abundant estate and his sometimes severe manner with the servants. While talking to the two old men, another serf, the middle aged Vlass, arrives home from a long journey visiting his landlord in Moscow. Joining the conversation, he laments the recent death of his son and his inability to get his absentee landlord to allow him to move to a smaller piece of land that he can afford. His landlord reprimands him for not taking the issue to the bailiff first. Vlass' story gives us a glimpse of the plight of peasant farmers who can barely make a living under the feudal system and were subjected to many abuses by landowners and their employees. In "Bailiff" we learn about the kind of blackmail and manipulation often committed by those who manage the landowners' estates, giving us a pretty good idea of why, in the earlier story, Vlass was reluctant to deal directly with his master's employee.
"Two Country Gentlemen" gives us a closer look at the landed gentry. Retired General Hvalinsky is a man of austere habits with a serious countenance who is an inept manager of his affairs. He keeps his inferiors at arm's length and supplicates his betters, but prefers to play cards with his inferiors. He enjoys his status, but is self-conscious about appearing to be too ostentatious. The opposite is true of Mardary Apollonitch, a jovial, friendly man with only a superficial interest in the affairs of his large estate. He is a landowner of the old style to whom appearances are of primary importance while in stark contrast, his servants live in squalid, ruinous huts overlooking his property.
Turgenev also brings in elements of traditional folklore in "Byezhin Prairie", a charming story about a group of boys by a campfire telling each other tales of faeries and ghosts. There is dark humor in these stories as well: "Lgov" is about a fishing trip gone wrong as a party of fisherman capsizes in a borrowed boat led a foolhardy fisherman named Vladimir. "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District" lampoons the pretensions of the landowning elite through the story of one of their ranks who has realized the meaninglessness of his social standing, and "Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew" is a wryly comic story of a woman whose nephew is whisked away to St. Petersburg by a rich benefactor. He leaves his aunt's home as an art prodigy and returns as a boorish, lazy, drunken lout. Now that's realism!
The longest piece of this collection is the two part story found in "Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin" and the sequel, "The End of Chertopkhanov", It is a tale of misfortune and existential terror in the heart of a landowner whose family and fortunes are on the wane. In these stories can be found, part and parcel, the very stuff of Russian storytelling: destitution, death, torrid romance, a fine horse, obsession, loss, drunkenness and insanity.
I found a wonderful contextual clue while researching this book: A Sportsman's Sketches was published in the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both of these works highlighted the injustices of slavery. The popularity of Turgenev's collection helped to raise awareness of the plight of Russia's peasantry, leading to an abolition of serfdom in 1860. The realism of Stowe's novel brought the horror of the enslavement of blacks into the public consciousness of Americans, and the change in public opinion ultimately led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Both authors used clear language to communicate stark truths that influenced the social and economic trajectories of their respective countries. The combination of plain words, good intentions and a willing audience can actually affect real change.
This is, of course, a best case scenario. Individual results may vary.
Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg
Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg
A note on the digital edition: Project Gutenberg has continued to revise their catalog by creating digital editions that work better with modern eReader devices. Currently, this book exists in two volumes, the second of which has yet to be formatted for such devices although it is available in plain text that can be converted to other formats using free eBook authoring software like Calibre. Let's hope that this classic is reviewed and revised into a nice eBook that contains both volumes. They're very busy folks who are doing good work, so we'll give them a break.
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