A Sportsman's Notebook Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction by Max Egremont

  Preface by Daniyal Mueenuddin

  Khor and Kalinich

  Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife

  Raspberry Water

  The Country Doctor

  My Neighbor Radilov

  Ovsyanikov the Freeholder

  Lgov

  Bezhin Meadow

  Kasyan from Fair Springs

  The Bailiff

  The Estate Office

  The Bear

  Two Landowners

  Lebedyan

  Tatyana Borisovna and Her Nephew

  Death

  The Singers

  Pyotr Petrovich Karataev

  The Rendezvous

  Prince Hamlet of Shchigrovo

  Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin

  The End of Chertopkhanov

  The Live Relic

  The Knocking

  Forest and Steppe

  About the Author

  Ecco Art of the Story

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  A Sportsman’s Notebook, the first of Turgenev’s masterpieces, was written in several stages, mostly between 1846 and 1851, with two of the stories in this volume (“The End of Chertopkanov” and “The Live Relic”) added later for an edition of 1874. Most of the stories appeared first in the Russian literary magazine The Contemporary between 1847 and 1851 and were published together in 1852 to the anger of the authorities. These coincided with a happy time in Turgenev’s relationship with the Spanish opera singer Pauline Viardot, especially those written in France in 1847 and 1848. Some of the inspiration for the book may have come from the infinitely more dreary Souvenirs de Chasse published by Pauline’s French husband Louis in 1846. Louis Viardot, a theatrical producer and impresario, was also a keen sportsman. This perhaps contributed to the curious fact that Turgenev and he seemed to have remained friends in spite of the novelist’s love for his wife.

  Ivan Turgenev came from a landowning family in the Russian province of Oryol. Born in 1818, he grew up on the family estate at Spasskoye in the care of his irascible and tyrannical mother whose behavior led to his early disgust with serfdom. She appears in several of his stories, most notably “Mumu,” “Punin and Baburin,” and “The Inn,” a forbidding and philistine figure who terrorized her serfs, quite different to her remote philandering husband who died in 1834 without apparently playing a great part in his son’s life except to suggest the romantic apartness of the distant parent in “First Love.” Turgenev attended schools in Moscow and universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg before leaving for Berlin. While he was away his mother missed him dreadfully. Later he worked briefly as a civil servant before resigning much against his mother’s will to devote himself entirely to writing. He met and fell in love with Pauline Viardot during her visit to St. Petersburg in 1843. Turgenev followed her and her husband to Paris and then to wherever she might be in Europe. In 1850, after his mother’s death, he inherited Spasskoye. However, his infatuation with Pauline and the hostile reception given to Fathers and Children in Russia after its publication in 1862 (particularly by radicals who thought it caricatured their beliefs) made him reluctant to visit his homeland for long.

  Like many novelists, Turgenev began as a poet. He was introduced to Pauline Viardot as “a young Russian landowner, a good shot, an agreeable companion and a writer of bad verses.” These words imply a dilettantism of which Turgenev would be sometimes accused. Dostoyevsky caricatured him as the precious and foolish Karamazinov in The Devils; Tolstoy condemned his frivolity. Turgenev was not a novelist of belief. In time he follows Pushkin and Lermontov, and early stories such as “The Duellist,” “Three Portraits,” and “The Jew” show the influence of their Byronic romanticism. He was also the heir to the more naturalistic Gogol, and his first true mentor was the liberal critic Belinsky, a westerner as opposed to a Slavophile. The nearest Turgenev gets to mysticism is in his descriptions of human or natural phenomena, not in some evocation of an unearthly divinity. He has no religion in the sense that Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky have.

  A Sportsman’s Notebook has no backbone of plot or schematic narrative. The episodes are not stories but glimpses of situations or characters, occasionally descriptions of scenery or landscape. For inspiration, Turgenev went back to his youth at Spasskoye, his mother’s estate, where hunting expeditions had been a way of escaping briefly from her tyranny. His motive in writing about the countryside must have been at least partly political. The reactionary Tsar Nicholas I was still on the throne and there seemed no prospect of reform. A landowner like Turgenev’s mother was the complete mistress of her domain and the serfs who were in bondage to her. Flaubert might remark on how the Notebook made him “want to be shaken alone in a telega through snow-covered fields, to the sound of wolves howling”; for Turgenev, however, there was the added purpose of describing these conditions to readers of influence and education, a very small class in Russia at that time. It is said that a reading of A Sportsman’s Notebook contributed to Tsar Alexander II’s decision to liberate the serfs.

  The book is both a work of imagination and of description; Belinsky had advised Turgenev to observe the facts and then filter them through his imagination. A Sportsman’s Notebook conveys the vastness and beauty of rural Russia. It shows also the eccentricity, cruelty and nobility of many of its inhabitants, a varied collection of peasants, landlords, bailiffs, overseers, horse dealers, and merchants. Turgenev observes them from a certain distance; he is a hunter travelling in search of game, often in the company of his faithful guide Ermolai who is probably based on one of his mother’s old house serfs, Afanasy Ivanov. It was also from Ivanov that he took down the touching words of the short reminiscence “About Nightingales.” Descendants of the serf were still living at Spasskoye in 1955.

  Ermolai and the narrator wander across the huge landscape of forest and steppe, usually with one or two hunting dogs, travelling sometimes for several days on end, walking or riding in carts, staying in village inns or with hospitable neighbors. Turgenev was fond of dogs. Later he was to write an elegiac memoir of his beloved Pegas, a half-bred retriever who would accompany him on similar shooting expeditions near Baden-Baden. This was the sort of sport which Turgenev enjoyed. No great numbers were killed; the spirit of the countryside and its people were as important as the bag itself, a different concept of pleasure to the great massacres of driven birds which were popular in England and Scotland at this time. Turgenev tried these and seems not to have enjoyed the experience. “Such expeditions—without dogs—are somewhat monotonous,” he wrote to Tolstoy in 1878. “In such circumstances one has to shoot very accurately, and I have always been only an average shot.” Louis Viardot, Pauline’s husband, was also scornful about shooting in England, disliking the game laws which he said unduly hampered his sport.

  Turgenev did not possess what one might call the killer’s instinct. Birds and animals could arouse not only his affection but his sentimentality as well. In another reminiscence called “The Quail” he remembers a hunting trip with his father and an old dog Trezor during which a quail sacrifices itself for her chicks. Later he sees a black-cock do the same; “after that day,” he writes, “I found it harder and harder to kill and shed blood.” Indeed, he declares, “I never became a real sportsman.” Yet Turgenev was a true countryman. During his time of imprisonment in 1852 after the publication of his eulogistic obituary of Gogol he thought longingly of those sporting expeditions of the past. Part of the reason he became so fond of Baden-Baden was because of the woods and forests that encircled the town.

  It was the enthusiastic reception accorded to
the first sketch of A Sportsman’s Notebook, “Khor and Kalinich,” that led Turgenev to decide not to abandon literature. Although his poems had been praised initially by Belinsky (whose habit it was to be indulgent towards a writer’s first work), they began soon to be met by a certain indifference. In another of his reminiscences Turgenev declares that “I quite soon realised myself that there was no need for me to carry on with such-like exercises and—made up my mind to give up literature altogether.” However I. I. Panayev, the editor of The Contemporary, was looking for articles and Turgenev gave him “Khor and Kalinich.” Paneyev added the words “From the sketches of a sportsman”; the piece aroused such interest that Turgenev was encouraged to do another.

  He was a careful writer, alive to each nuance of language and subtlety of style. Words fascinated him; he regarded Russian as an exquisite instrument. Constance Garnett, whose translations introduced Turgenev to the English-speaking world, wished later that she had come first to Tolstoy who wrote in a much less artful way. She found A Sportsman’s Notebook particularly difficult because of the author’s use of dialect. Some translators baulk at rendering the idiomatic speech of the peasants or the backwoods landlords into an English equivalent; others attempt what can seem like a version of The Archers transposed to the steppes.

  Probably much is lost in translation. The Russian critic Zhdanov said he believed it to be impossible to translate Turgenev and retain the effect of the original. Constance Garnett herself declared that “Turgenev is much the most difficult of the Russians to translate because his style is the most beautiful.” I do not read Russian. Yet to me an atmosphere and beauty of description come through in English. The book’s extraordinary evocation of the countryside, its life and climate, the often pathetic condition and struggles of those who live there: these are there in this version as well.

  Rural Russia could be a brutal place. There was poverty and cruelty, ignorance and disease. Even the narrator’s faithful companion Ermolai is described in “Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife” as a wife-beater who kills winged birds by biting into their necks. In “Raspberry Water” a manor house has burnt down and been abandoned by its family. Only a pathetic gardener remains in a hut nearby. It is his job to supply vegetables for the manorial table a hundred and fifty miles away; his wife tries vainly to milk a barren cow. Another peasant tells of the house’s previous owner, the wastrel Count who died bankrupt in a St. Petersburg hotel. Once there were wild parties, decadent extravagance, hounds kept on silver leads, rapacious mistresses, unthinking severity towards the serfs. Yet “the master was everything a master should be,” the old man says. “They were good old days, all the same!” Almost anything can be transformed by memory into human nostalgia and its longing for a golden age.

  Coming as he does from a landowning family, the narrator cannot escape the occasionally brutal deeds of his forebears. In “Ovsyanikov the Freeholder” Ovsyanikov cheerfully relates how the narrator’s grandfather seized some of his family’s land, reacting to their protests by sending his huntsmen and a gang of ruffians to fetch the freeholder’s father and beat him under the windows of the manor house. The narrator also shows a Russian vagueness about his ancestral possessions. In “The Live Relic” he and Ermolai are caught in the rain. The serf tells him they can shelter at “a little farm belonging to your mother; eight versts from here.” Previously he did not know of the place’s existence.

  Throughout the book there is this dichotomy: an obvious distance between the narrator and the country people he meets, yet also a strong sense of them as individuals. The distance comes from class and education; the clear characterization from a country upbringing and solitary childhood during which Turgenev came to rely on the peasants for company. A youthful affair with a seamstress at Spasskoye resulted in an illegitimate daughter; there may have been other involvements with peasant girls, as was common then on Russian estates. Turgenev could write with sympathy of the landowner Chertopkhanov’s love for the peasant girl Masha in “Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin” and “The End of Chertopkhanov,” a precursor of Kirsanov’s feelings for Fenitchka in Fathers and Children. His own affairs were probably not so intense as the one in the story. No woman in Turgenev’s life ever matched Pauline Viardot.

  A lack of intensity has always been one of the charges laid against Turgenev. It does not diminish his powers of sympathy or feeling. In “The Live Relic,” first published in 1874, long after most of the other stories, the fresh beauty of the sunlit garden after the rain offsets the pathetic predicament of the diseased but once lovely peasant girl who had led the dancing in his mother’s household to create one of his most affecting portraits. The blameless Lukerya was doomed before the age of thirty. Turgenev compares her to Joan of Arc and in the context of her suffering the comparison seems apt. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Illyich, she has contracted a mysterious illness after a fall. Her fiancé, the wine butler, grieves for her, then marries someone else. She has been lying in the hut for seven years, looked after by the locals, dreaming and watching the animals and birds, close to the natural beauties around her. There is a sad irony in the local constable’s claim that she has been “smitten by God, for her sins no doubt.”

  The theme is that of submission to fate. It is a constant presence in Turgenev’s work: in the shocking return of Lavretsky’s wife in The Nest of Gentlefolk, in Sanin’s ill-fated courtship in The Torrents of Spring, the death of Insarov in On the Eve, the crumbling of Bazarov’s strength in Fathers and Children. The image of inaction, of the withered body lying on a sick bed, is characteristic as well. At this point all activity can seem to be ultimately futile, even doomed. This, however, does not lessen the moral power or simple strength of the Lukeryas: those who suffer with resignation and even a certain strange joy.

  Fate hovers over “Bezhin Meadow” with an almost supernatural sense of foreboding. On a summer night, peasant boys sit by fires, guarding the horses. They cook potatoes and as the narrator lies near them pretending to sleep he hears their talk of ghostly apparitions and the imaginative world of childhood. Ahead lie the uncertainties and probable hardship of their adult lives; for the moment they are excited innocents. Later the narrator hears of the tragedy that strikes down the most memorable of them. With that characteristic concision of sympathy, Turgenev writes “A pity, he was a splendid lad!” People and their fate: for Turgenev the elusive link was of ceaseless fascination. In “King Lear of the Steppes” he writes “Everything in the world, good and bad, comes to man, not through his deserts, but in consequence of some as yet unknown but logical laws which I will not take upon myself to indicate, though I sometimes fancy I have a dim perception of them.”

  Turgenev’s characters live in a way that those of few other writers can. He told Henry James that his stories had their origins not in an idea but a human image; then he would seek a plot or situation in which to place this. The characters in A Sportsman’s Notebook are precursors of his later often blighted and occasionally heroic inhabitants of rural Russia: the tormented Harlov in “King Lear of the Steppes,” the broken down nobleman in “The Brigadier,” the curious couple in “Punin and Baburin.” Like these, the people of A Sportsman’s Notebook convey the sense of their time and position: the way these can bring nobility to some, also lead to frustration or almost absurd stoicism and occasionally create monsters. In “My Neighbor Radilov” the courteous but preoccupied landowner with whom Turgenev dines is a victim of the Orthodox Church’s refusal to allow a man to marry the sister of his dead wife. “The Bailiff,” with its picture of the cruel dandy on his rarely visited property, shows the peasants at the mercy of the landowner’s vicious but sycophantic agent; in “The Office” we see the workings of the capricious bureaucracy of a landed estate. The absurdly pompous Major-General Khvalinsky in “Two Landowners” is almost as detestable as his neighbor, the bachelor Stegunov who declares “As I see it, the master is the master and the peasant is the peasant . . . and that’s all there is to it.” Stegunov hums as he list
ens to the sound of his butler being beaten; what makes the incident even more pathetic is that the butler tells Turgenev later that he is sure he deserved his punishment. The serf declares admiringly that “you won’t find another master like him in the whole province.” Turgenev writes simply “there’s old mother Russia for you, I thought on my way home.”

  It is partly through this suffering that Turgenev gives a unique spiritual dimension to the Russian peasant. The dying Lukerya in “The Live Relic” has it, as does the mysterious dwarf Kasyan in “Kasyan from Fair Springs” who is said to possess the power of healing. In “The Bear” it seems as if the giant solitary forester is almost at one with the woods he is protecting on behalf of his master. The death of a man crushed by a tree in “Death” shows such simple acceptance that Turgenev is moved to write “Strange how death takes the Russian peasant! His state of mind at his last hour cannot be called indifference or dull-wittedness; he dies as if he were going through a ceremony: coldly, and with simplicity.” By contrast the landowners are usually portrayed in a less attractive light. There is not much spiritual awareness in the arrogant remount officer Prince N. and his toady Lieutenant Khlopakov in “Lebedyan.”

  It is generally the peasants who supply the moments of transcendent beauty. In “The Singers” the singing competition between Yasha the Turk and the huckster in the “Snug Nook” pot-house takes place amid squalid and pathetic surroundings but once the music begins each competitor “climbs out of his skin,” the winner attracting “silent passionate attention” as “with every note there floated out something noble and immeasurably large, like familiar steppe-country unfolding before you, stretching away into the boundless distance.” The narrator forgets the low pot-house; he thinks of “a great white gull” slowly stretching its long wings “towards the familiar sea, towards the low, blood-red sun.” It is a triumph of simplicity, of a skill as natural as the vast countryside itself. At the end another human reality returns; as the narrator leaves he hears a child calling out to one of its siblings to come home to be beaten by their father.