A Sportsman's Notebook Read online

  In Turgenev’s landscape of forest and steppe lurk those traits of character which he would develop later in his novels. “Khor and Kalinich” represent two sides of human nature: the one cautious, reserved and calculating; the other instinctive, talkative and idealistic, a more typical Turgenev hero. The provincial Hamlet of “Prince Hamlet of Shchigrovo” proves in his dispiriting soliloquy the disastrous effects of self-pity and irresolution, describing his perverse pleasure at having reached “the extreme limit of misfortune.” It is a study similar to that of the Diary of a Superfluous Man, the weakness of will typical also of the main character in Rudin and the almost masochistic descent into failure and farce of Nezhdanov in Virgin Soil. Turgenev would write later of the contrast between the Hamlets and the Don Quixotes of this world: the men of indecision and introspection and those who are decisive and free from egoism. Objectively he favored Don Quixote’s questing active spirit; he knew, however, that he himself had much more of Hamlet’s temperament. This made him understand the failure of the nameless man from Shchigrovo, the thwarted hopeless love of Pyotr Petrovich Karataev for Matrona, of Radilov for Olga in “My Neighbour Radilov,” of Chertopkhanov for Masha. Turgenev believed love to be doomed generally to end in a sense of disappointment or loss.

  Turgenev seems at times almost to cherish weakness. Of his central figures, perhaps only Bazarov in Fathers and Children and Insarov in On the Eve are strong and even they at the end become victims, pathetic in death. One may perhaps look to Turgenev’s own life for an echo of this in the follower of the Viardot family around Europe. Turgenev was accepted by Pauline’s elderly husband Louis and their children; they were happy even that he should have his own illegitimate daughter by a serf at Spasskoye brought up in their family. But Pauline put her art above all other attachments, whereas Turgenev would have been prepared to give up everything for her. Whether they were ever lovers is doubtful; Turgenev’s love for her is not in doubt. It was the strength of her ultimate indifference against the weakness of his devotion. His work seems often to proclaim that lasting mutually satisfying love is unattainable, especially when the passion of one of the lovers is particularly great. The liberal exile Alexander Herzen wrote of the middle-aged Turgenev at Baden-Baden: “he is in love with the Viardot like an eighteen year old.”

  Melancholy, doubt and occasional timidity molded Turgenev as a writer. He found it more than usually hard to bear the dislike of others; he distrusted the grand solution or the strident campaign. No wonder Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky despised him; he could not share their certainties or vigorous determination. In love he was not exactly thwarted but almost certainly unfulfilled. In politics he found himself often cursed by revolutionaries and conservatives alike; perhaps this is always the destiny of the liberal at a time of extremes. Yet the political message of A Sportsman’s Notebook is simple, if necessarily not too obvious because of the Tsarist censor. The abolition of serfdom was a great radical cause in the 1840s and 1850s. With this, Turgenev was in full agreement. For a few years the book made him immensely admired among educated people in his homeland before the disapproval that followed the publication of Fathers and Children in 1862.

  He was too subtle a writer to produce a mere political tract. It was partly the Hamlet in him which prevented this, the irresolution his more certain contemporaries castigated and that now seems often a relief from their didactic sermons. His artistry was a barrier to propaganda or preaching. The propagandist or the preacher must put a detailed case; Turgenev wrote once that “the secret of being tedious was to say everything.” In this book, the first of his masterpieces, he proved the truth of this, impressing others with it as well. Herzen had previously believed Turgenev to be “educated and clever” but “superficial and fatuous.” He changed his mind after reading A Sportsman’s Notebook.

  Turgenev once said that “no matter what I write my work will always take the form of a series of sketches.” In his last novel, Virgin Soil, he tried a more ambitious approach, comparable to the grand scale of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. It did not work although the book has memorable passages, not least the satire of the populist “back to the people” movement of students and revolutionaries of the late 1860s and the portraits of the “liberal” noble Sipyagin and his affected wife. His most successful novels are those of character and situation, like Rudin and Fathers and Children. In them his lyrical sympathy evokes the shades of a wood in autumn, a sense of bitter-sweet melancholy and regret: hints also of the political and social turmoil of his homeland, that vast strange landscape of forest and steppe. Turgenev too had that primitive soul with which the nineteenth-century Russians captivated Europe.

  This makes him a deceptive writer. His books evoke melancholy, disillusion and frustrated romance; they are often chronicles of decay, hopelessness, and futility. Charm is one of their chief attributes, together with a beguiling style, a beauty of description, a deftness of characterization. Yet, as A Sportsman’s Notebook shows, he is also profoundly Russian, an exile from a vast and extraordinary country for which he retained a deep love in spite of his disapproval of its often brutal and unjust government. With this love came a profound concern for the social and political developments of his homeland. Turgenev refused to shut himself away with his art in the way that his friend and admirer Flaubert did. He was a stylist but not in isolation, never apart from his times.

  At first glance Turgenev’s “Russianness” is not so obvious as that of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. This is partly because his love of Russia was tempered with respect for western ideas and institutions about which he knew more than his other great Russian literary contemporaries. Fluent in several European languages, he was as at ease in the literary worlds of Paris, London and Berlin as in those of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Among his friends and admirers were Flaubert, George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, Carlyle, Monckton Milnes and Henry James. He attended the Magny dinners and the salon of the Princess Mathilde. He lived out of Russia for much of his life, with the Viardots in France or at Baden-Baden and for a brief time in London during the Franco-Prussian War.

  He became a “westerner” early on, after escaping from his mother to study in Berlin. It is probable that the scorn of Potugin in “Smoke” for simplistic Slavophilism echoes the views of Turgenev himself and his fears for Russia in the years of revolutionary turmoil that followed the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Yet glib “westerners” such as Panshin in A Nest of Gentlefolk or the old noblemen Ivan Matveitch in “An Unhappy Girl” receive rough handling as well. In 1859 Turgenev wrote from the house of his beloved Pauline Viardot in France that “there is no happiness outside the family—and outside one’s native land; everyone should stay in his own nest and put down roots into his native soil. What is the point of clinging on to the edge of someone else’s nest?” Turgenev clung to the edge of someone else’s nest for much of his life.

  To a European reader, he is perhaps the most approachable of the great Russians. He was the first great Russian writer to attain fame in the west and seems to have appealed particularly to the climate of disenchantment and melancholy in England at the end of the nineteenth century. The early translations by Constance Garnett were admired by Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy; Henry James proclaimed him “the first novelist of the day” although he complained about the Russian’s “atmosphere of unrelieved sadness.” Others have found themselves moved and haunted by the stories of loss and disillusion, of failure and regret, of the often disappointing consequences of enthusiasm, of an almost timeless world where emotion and character draw gentle weak men to an inevitable doom. Most of Turgenev’s men are weak, just as many of his women are strong.

  Only a Russian could have portrayed such a gallery of fools, eccentrics, brutes and saints; through the great nineteenth-century Russian writers we have come to recognize these characters as typical of only one European country. Turgenev was the polite companion of the Viardots, gentle guest of the Princess Mathilde and cultivated participant in the Magny dinners. Yet he carri
ed with him also those memories of a brutal loveless childhood, the barbarity and arbitrary power that reigned in a huge pitiless landscape where humans were bought and sold like chattels. Against this he felt often quite powerless. The achievement of A Sportsman’s Notebook is to show how genius can have power enough of its own.

  The critical tone of the book annoyed the authorities. Throughout his life they continued to look upon its author with suspicion. After Turgenev’s death in France in 1883 his body was taken back to St. Petersburg to be buried near Belinsky, his first mentor. The great European writer who had proclaimed himself to be a coward showed his influence in his homeland even from beyond the grave. The Tsar’s secret police watched his funeral for signs of political demonstration, a tribute indeed to this man who had been criticised for his weakness and supposed reluctance to take sides.

  Max Egremont

  Preface

  MY AFGHAN GODFATHER, A BRISTLING MILITARY MAN, WHO AT one time back in the 1930s held the all-India motorcycle speed record, spoke of A Sportsman’s Notebook as one of the two or three books that formed and continued to inform his mind. I remember his copy of it lying on his bedside table, leather-bound, pocket-size, printed on onionskin paper. He cared more for horses and dogs than for books, and could in no degree be thought literary, yet he found a place of repose in Turgenev’s stories, a cool refuge from a life of heat and action. The Notebook is that kind of book, one that appeals widely, and one that strikes deep, one that can serve sturdily through an entire life.

  The Notebook lands at a critical stage in the development of the short story. Turgenev had the good fortune to be born and bred in the place where this poetic form, the short story, came to its highest (yet) glory—the Russia of the middle and late nineteenth century. Chekhov is Chekhov, and comparisons are odious when talking about writers of this standard and so closely aligned. Yet if Chekhov finds a sublimity unequaled by anyone, certainly A Sportsman’s Notebook can beguile us so deeply with its descriptions of man and beast and the lord’s good earth that we say, thank you for what you have done, and well done, and please do it again and again, as he does. The book passes through many rooms, and each has its deep interest. It is that unusual thing, a classic that is not pitched right down the middle. It is quirky. Coming early in the development of the short story form, it has the raw originality of youth, is bright and morning.

  Turgenev’s family received properties from the czars whom they served since coming over from the Golden Horde in 1440 to join the court of Grand Prince Vasili Ivanovich. Spasskoye, the name of Turgenev’s principal estate, where these stories are set, comprised fifty thousand acres of good black earth. The Turgenevs held this land since the 1600s, granted to them as a reward for military service. Fifty thousand acres is not merely a farm, it’s a state. There were Indian princely states—other principalities throughout history—smaller than that. That’s seventy-eight square miles, or a box eight miles to a side.

  Russian history—the history of those lands—is shot through with violence, right up to the present day. The callousness of the administration toward the workers sent in to clean with mop and pail the irradiated hulk of the Chernobyl reactor had roots in the violence of the earliest rulers of Russia. Peter the Great could crush a gold coin in his massive fist, but all those mad or sane rulers crushed men for sport. Absolute in her realm, Turgenev’s mother, Varvara Petrovna, ruled Spasskoye with a caprice and violence rare even for the extravagantly despotic nobility of her day. She printed her own paper, weaved cloth, grew all her food, cut timber, ran sawmills, made candles. All sorts of works. If Russia had ceased to exist and Spasskoye floated in the middle of a blue sea she would have missed only the clothes she ordered from Paris—the indulgence of a jolie laide married to a dashing and chronically unfaithful man.

  Turgenev’s grandmother once beat to death a page-boy and hid the body in her embarrassment under a pile of cushions. His mother demanded that men being sent to Siberia or to serve in the army, a lifetime’s banishment, parade before leaving under her living room window and thank her for her forbearance to them. As a young man Turgenev observed a little girl being abused in the courtyard of his mother’s Petersburg house and realized with a start that this was his own illegitimate daughter from a Spasskoye serf woman. His mother knew of the girl’s parentage and surely bound her to hardship as another of the torments she might inflict on this son that she adored and yet must hurt—as she herself had been hurt so badly in childhood, rejected by her own mother, preyed upon sexually by her stepfather. (Turgenev took the girl to Paris and educated her and settled a substantial dowry upon her, renamed her Paulinette after the love of his life, Pauline Viardot—one of the finest European singing voices of her time. That is another story.)

  This estate, and the hard times his mother showed him there, are schools for this book. Had Varvara Petrovna been a better woman, Turgenev would not have had the knowledge to write A Sportsman’s Notebook. These stories are as much informed by his mother’s despotism as by the larger despotism of the Russian state. His personal revolt ran parallel to a larger national political revolt. Through his childhood and later as a man, Turgenev sought out the company of the serfs in the kennels and kitchens of Spasskoye because among them he found kindness. A Sportsman’s Notebook is the fruit of those encounters. The strength of these stories is in his portraits of these men and women.

  The Notebook comprises his first truly successful work. When in 1852, at the age of thirty-four, he issued the first edition, with most of the canonical stories that are included in the present volume, he had published a few slight pieces, nothing to suggest the brilliance to come. The Notebook has the quality of work done for himself, for love, unrestrained. Not bothering about plot too much, he drew portraits of these men and women from the estate, took up stories that he had heard or seen enacted. The characteristic that distinguishes stories about life from life itself is that life has no plot, no meaningful plot. In most cases, as we have come to understand the short story form, plot is imposed upon human interactions by the writer. One great charm of these stories is that they are so unplotted, some of them held together only by the framing device of the narrator going out hunting and encountering some man or woman or situation. More than others, Turgenev can say, in his modest offhand voice, I made it out of a mouthful of air.

  Unusually, for a work of fiction—for any work of art—the Notebook played an important political role in the history of Russia. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the necessity of liberating the serfs, who were virtually slaves, had become pressing upon an increasingly westernized nobility. The necessity of their liberation, and then the means and outlines of that emancipation, puzzled the nobles and most importantly, the czar—Alexander II. This constituency found it difficult to reconcile itself to the loss of their revenues and powers flowing from this emancipation in part because they knew very little about their serfs, had never paid much attention to them. They commanded obedience with banishments and the knout, and otherwise indulged themselves with serf orchestras on their estates and desperate feats of gambling and spoke French among themselves. If they gave it any thought, they would have considered it an impertinence for their serfs to have private lives.

  Turgenev’s stories imposed the humanity of these men and women upon their owners, showed them in all their complexity. The stories came as a revelation to their readership. Any man who’s ever killed a chicken knows that it’s best not to look it in the eye. Turgenev forced his fellow landowners to do that, look the serfs in the eye. Alexander II acknowledged the role these stories played in guiding him to issue the Emancipation Edict that freed the serfs in 1861.

  Even today, with our different circumstances, we can benefit from this compelled awakening. In Turgenev’s time a debate—which directly led to the terrible Russian Revolution—raged between those who advocated a turn to the West, and those who dreamed of a new Slavic establishment different from anything bred in Europe. It might seem that these
combats, long played out, are irrelevant today. The debate about the correct direction for Russia’s development, while it included the class conflict between landowners and serfs, had at its core a cultural conflict, a fundamentally Oriental Russianness pulling against European rationalism. This is in many respects the same as our present-day debate about the interpenetration between the Northern and the Southern hemispheres. Both are questions about how two cultures should marry

  The Notebook has some particular excellencies, which I would point out to you, gentle reader, as would a host at a banquet drawing out with fork and knife a delicacy on the served platter. Turgenev is masterful in these stories of two particularly difficult arts, sketches of characters, men and women in all their complexity, and descriptions of nature. The stories are juxtapositions of these two excellencies.

  He is describing the steppe, is walking across it: “Whirlwinds—sure sign of settled weather—march in tall white pillars. . . .”

  I have seen many whirlwinds, but I’ve never before observed that, when the wind blows up twirling columns of dust and straw along a field, this means it will be fine and blue. I’ve taken more words to show it than he does—he is so right in these descriptions.

  There are many superb passages describing landscape—I won’t quote one here, you’ll encounter them soon enough. No one does it better, because he observes nature so closely and because he knows it so well. The title of the book is quite accurate—these are notebooks drawn from the experiences of a passionate sportsman. The great solace of Turgenev’s life was shooting, mostly birds. He was a disappointed man—disappointed first in childhood, in his mother’s love. His contemporaries dismissed him as ineffectual and shapeless, and though he wrote these brilliant tales and much else, too often he was characterized simply as a conteur. Landscape is the refuge of the wounded spirit, and one senses behind his romantic and passionate descriptions of the Russian steppe the sad uncertainty that he felt regarding his place among men and women. The generous descriptions of men and women at Spasskoye are drawn with all the love of the hungry-hearted boy; the descriptions of nature are written from the perspective of the rootless man.