One reason I decided to read Turgenev's Sketches is because I very much appreciated his colorful and vivid character descriptions in the novels by him that I had already read, and he makes full use of that particular talent of his in this collection of short-stories. It's not just simply a collection of short-stories though since the narrator stays the same and there’s also his constant hunting companion Yermolay, who figures in several of these stories. Turgenev's descriptions of the landowning gentry and peasants are based on his experiences while out hunting in the areas surrounding his estate at Spasskoye – and they are often told with wry humor and sometimes imbued with that particular sense of sadness that I have found only in Russian literature. Besides the many different fascinating – and sometimes unforgettable - characters of these stories there’s also Turgenev's absorbing descriptions of the Russian countryside – though while in just this area he is sometimes bordering a bit too much on Romanticism (for my own taste), it’s easily forgivable not only when taking into account that these stories were first published in 1852, but also because Turgenev's genuine appreciation of nature is so obvious. As he writes in Forest and Steppe, "suppose you are not a born hunter, though you still love nature; in that case you can hardly fail to envy the lot of your brother hunters.." - I read this book while moving house, thinking that short-stories could be the perfect reading material in the course of this busy period, and the slow, lingering pace of most of this stories was indeed a great "antidote" for just that predicament. As a matter of fact, it could also be a great remedy for anyone heavily inflicted with the "modern condition". I read the complete edition containing all twenty-five of the Sketches, in a translation by Richard Freeborn, and to put it briefly: most of them are both both captivating and outstanding. I’ve read that Hemingway admired Turgenev for his short stories, now I know why.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

Très bien écrit et on plonge dans la vieille Russie ( )

Não ser um caçador nobre em Oriol na década de 1850 é a maior tragédia que pode recair sobre um homem. ( )

(I haven't read the whole book, just this story which is reprinted in Saunders' book)

The second story that George Saunders explores in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (see my review) is ‘The Singers’ by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1893). It comes from an 1852 collection of short stories called A Sportsman’s Sketches also translated as A Sportsman’s Notebook, The Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. According to Wikipedia, this collection was a milestone of Russian realism, and it made Turgenev’s name.

When I read Fathers and Sons, I was very taken by the characterisation of the young idealist Bazarov and in the comments below my review you can see where I admired the way Turgenev uses dialogue to differentiate his characters. There is not much dialogue, however, in this most engaging short story about a singing competition in a remote rural pub. Instead, it is Turgenev’s powers of description which impel the reader on.

Plunging into the story reproduced in Saunders’ book without an introduction or any context, it’s not immediately obvious who the unnamed narrator is and why he is roaming about in the vicinity of Kolotovka, a small and cheerless village. But within a couple of pages we have learned that he’s an observant outsider, (which is apparently an element of the Russian realist tradition where the narrator is usually an uncommitted observer of the people he meets.) However, he passes by regularly enough to be acquainted with some of the drinkers at the Cosy Corner pub, and to make some judgements about them. He’s a gentleman well-educated enough to have ‘readers’ and even if we didn’t have Wikipedia, we could guess that he’s either a journalist or that he’s writing a newsy letter for educated people at home, who’re going to read it en famille as people did in those days. He explains his reasons for being in such a dismal place by saying that he’s a sportsman who goes everywhere. Since he’s pursuing this sport alone out in the middle of nowhere this is enough to identify him as a hunter, (though some of us would dispute that shooting animals is any kind of sport.)

Outside, the narrator witnesses an excited exchange between two patrons of the pub. Booby exhorts Blinker to hurry up because everyone is waiting: there is Yashka the Turk, the Wild Gentleman, and the contractor from Zhizdra. (The contractor is not named, not even with an intriguing nickname although Russians are past-masters at giving nicknames.) The excitement is because Yashka and the contractor have made a bet: they’ve wagered a quart of beer to see who wins.

So in this remote rural outpost, with nothing to commend it, an extraordinary cultural moment takes place—a singing competition between the local hero and a challenger from a nearby village.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/06/15/the-singers-by-ivan-turgenev-translated-by-d... ( )

On the face of it this seems a very modest, unassuming collection of short stories, most of them little more than sketches or anecdotes, narrated by a gentleman who has inherited his grandfather's estate in the Russian countryside and goes there to shoot for a few weeks of the year. But it's considered to be one of the most politically influential texts in 19th century Russian literature.

The reason for that seems to lie in the way Turgenev's sportsman-narrator engages with the country people he meets and tries to discover their stories and the way they live. Naturally, they all turn out to be complex human individuals, each with a unique background and personal characteristics, and highly-specific relationships, problems, hopes and dreams. The serfs stubbornly refuse to dissolve into the romantic notion of "Russian peasant" (spirituality, resignation, stubbornness, tradition); the landowners equally fail to fall into any stereotypical notions we might have of gentlemanly or aristocratic attitudes.

Moreover, it often turns out that the serf characters have had their lives messed up in multiple ways by the thoughtless and arbitrary behaviour of their owners. The narrator never explicitly criticises this behaviour, but he notes its effects, and he leaves us to draw our own conclusions about whether that sort of thing is acceptable in a modern European country in the middle of the progressive nineteenth century.

The narrator is always described as a sportsman, but shooting birds doesn't enter much into the stories. The usual pattern is that he goes to a particular place in order to shoot, there's a lyrical description of the landscape, and then something happens to prevent him from getting to grips with the birds, and he meets someone who turns out to have an interesting story. More often than not, something else then happens to prevent that person from quite getting to the end of the story, so we are left dangling slightly, and have to work things out for ourselves a little. A couple of times we get someone who appears as a minor character in one story and is then fully developed in their own right in the next, but apart from that there is no overall development between the stories.

Oddly enough, Turgenev's technique reminded me very strongly of Mary Russell Mitford, a writer from a rather different background, but with the same kind of intelligent interest in how rural life works and what problems country people have to deal with. And the same sort of mix of lyrical-but-precise scenic description and realistic observation of human behaviour. Lovely, compassionate and very compelling writing in both cases.

The 2020 Ecco edition of the Hepburn translation (originally published by Everyman) comes with an extra introduction by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, who talks about how relevant he still finds Turgenev's stories to the semi-feudal agricultural society he grew up in. ( )