Memórias de um Caçador (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 1852; vuoden 2013 painos)

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. ( )

Turgueniev haciendo una especie de «[b:Allá lejos y hace tiempo|43194416|Allá lejos y hace tiempo|W.H. Hudson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1544507792l/43194416._SX50_.jpg|76011]», pero al otro lado del globo: la Rusia zarista. De corte netamente pastoril, destaca la increíble capacidad del autor para describir paisajes y personajes, una habilidad casi más cercana a la pintura que a la escritura. No se busquen historias inolvidables o acrobacias argumentales: aquí prima lo atmosférico y lo sensible. También la obra es de gran interés como documento de los estratos sociales en una época bastante anterior a la revolución de 1917: los siervos de la gleba, los libertos, los nobles pobres, los nuevos ricos...
Es una obra bastante diferente a la producción más conocida del autor, pero aún así su prosa brilla en una manera poco común. Turgueniev (o Turgenev? Turguenev? Turgeniev?) es un titán injustamente olvidado de las letras de su país. ( )

Read 2015. ( )

The writing is good, the stories interesting. Even today it works as an antidote to the cliche of the emotionless Russian people. The book form, as opposed to perhaps a series in a magazine, is a bit tiresome and made me skip a few pages here and there, though. ( )

891.733 TUR