Originally prepared for: RUS 493 - "African-American Literary Ties to Russian Intellectual Thought"
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in Oryol, some two hundred miles or so south of Moscow, in 1818. He spent his boyhood on his mother's estate of Spasskoye. Here he naturally learned about the injustices of the serf system, in addition to learning from the frequent beatings which he received at his mother's hand how cruel and brutalizing such a system could be. He survived the tyranny which his mother exercised in her household, but the experience taught. him to detest all tyrannies, especially the tyranny of serfdom and the accompanying political tyranny of Tsarist absolutism. A period at Berlin University at the end of the 1830's gave the young Turgenev an opportunity to study Western Europe, with the result that he returned to Russia in 1841 as a man of convinced Westernist views. Westernists, it should be explained, were those members of the Russian intelligentsia who were committed to the belief that Russia should be westernized, following the initiative already taken in this respect by Peter the Great a at the beginning of the eighteenth century, as opposed to the Slavophils, who wished to reject Western influences and based their hopes for Russia on the presumed superiority of things Russian.
Although Turgenev had been writing poems and articles since the middle of the 1830's, it was not until 1843 that he published his first successful work, a long narrative poem entitled Parasha. He was praised for this work by the critic Vissarion Belinsky and it was partly due to Belinsky's influence that Turgenev began to devote himself to realistic depiction of the inadequacies in Russian society. Thus he became not only a chronicler of his own generation and his own society, but also a critic of his own generation's Hamletism and of the fundamental injustice of serfdom on which Russian society was based. Yet there was something accidental or only partly intentional, about Turgenev's assumption of such roles. Intending to be a poet, he had by the latter part of the 1840's begun to demonstrate that he had remarkable talents as a writer of prose; intending to write a series of 'physiological' sketches od urban life on the lines of Gogol's St. Petersburg Stories, or Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk, he found himself writing about the Russian countryside in which he had grown up; intending, in a moment of despair, to abandon literature for good, he left a short work entitled Khor and Kalinych in the editorial offices of the newly resuscitated journal The Contemporary, and the success of the work when it was first published early in 1847 (The Contemporary, No. 1) persuaded Turgenev to return to literature and marked the beginning of the Sketches which were to bring him lasting fame.
A representative of the new Russian intelligentsia, as much at home in Paris or Berlin as in Moscow or St Petersburg, a man of noble birth, liberal inclinations and cultivated tastes, extraordinarily gifted and well-read, Turgenev possessed an urbane charm which made him excellent company in any society. Though he admired women, he never married. His emotional life was dominated by the attachment which he formed for the famous singer Pauline Viardot, whom he met during her first visit to St Petersburg in the 1843-4 opera season and with whom he was to remain on terms of close intimacy until his death in 1883. Whether or not he was her lover is a matter on which a great deal of speculative comment has been expended, but it is characteristic of a certain contrariness in his nature that he should also have been on very amicable terms with Pauline's husband, Louis Viardot. For our purposes, this second relationship is more important, because Louis Viardot and Turgenev were not only in love with the same woman they were also in love with hunting, and it is very likely that a little collection of hunting memoirs entitled Souvenirs de chasses which Louis Viardot published in 1846 gave Turgenev the idea for his own Sketches.
Other Russian writers had, of course, written about the peasantry - Radishchev, Pushkin, Gogol - and there were also such European writers as George Sand or Maria Edgeworth upon whom Turgenev could have modelled his own work. Strictly speaking, however, his Sketches are not modelled on anything save his own experience. He wrote most of them while he was outside Russia between 1847 and 1851, while travelling in Europe or during a period spent on the Viardot estate of Courtavenel outside Paris. The fact that he was drawing on memory may account for the brilliant lustre, so evocative and even nostalgic, which surrounds the best of them; equally, perhaps, it my be that some of the luxuriance of the countryside about Courtavenel shines through the richness of the nature descriptions. Yet it must be stressed that these Sketches were composed largely fortuitously. They grew out of the success of Khor and Kalinych and the fact that his mother failed to provide him with adequate financial means. While writing them he was also busily engaged in attempting to make a reputation for himself as a dramatist - an attempt which culminated in the writing of his only important play, the five-act comedy A Month in the Country. These Sketches, therefore, are not all of a piece. In some respects, they are occasional pieces, experiments in a particular kind of portraiture, tracts for the times cast in the mould of literature, trial sketches for his future work as a novelist. The order which he finally chose for them, which is the order followed in this translated selection, does not observe a strict chronology and is evidence of the fact that he was never inclined to regard them as truly completed. Despite this, his Sketches have long been acknowledged to be masterpieces which occupy a very special place in Russian literature.
Khor and Kalinych illustrates many of their most characteristic features. It introduces the author in the role that he is to assume throughout his work - the role, that is, of intelligent, interested but uncommitted observer. The observation has two discernible aspects to it: there is the lucid, clear-cut, pictorial aspect contributed by Turgenev, the writer and artist; and there is what might be called the sociological aspect, which involves the Turgenev who cannot help being a member of the nobility, of the landowning class, and who to that extent is both a stranger in the world of the peasants and a frankly curious observer anxious to describe this world to his readers. For fear of censorship and no doubt for reasons of taste, Turgenev does not attempt to lay undue emphasis on the fact of serfdom, but the propagandist element in his portraits of the two peasants, Khor (the polecat) and Kalinych, is evident enough. They can be said to represent differing types both of personality and, loosely speaking, of literary portraiture. Such differentiation serves not only to emphasize the individual human qualities in the two peasants but also anticipates Turgenev's later preoccupation (in his lecture of 1860) with the division of human beings into those who are Hamlet-like or those who are predominantly Quixotic by nature. Apart, though, from laying stress on the intelligence of both the peasants, on their individuality as well as their 'typical' differences, this first Sketch also illustrates what is, in general, to be regarded as Turgenev's usual attitude - so far, at least, as these Sketches are concerned - towards the nobility. The portrait of Polutykin kindly enough in itself, is not without that laconic and slightly mocking tone which Turgenev so often uses in describing the nobility. On these grounds alone, there is good reason for supposing that the tendentiousness in these Sketches is rather more anti-establishment than overtly pro-peasantry.
Khor and Khalinych also sheds light on such common features of peasant life as the 'eagles' who exploit the peasant women, the itinerant scythe traders and the strict hierarchy which governs the relationship between Khor and his family, despite the good-natured bantering between Khor and his son, Fedya. Naturally, Turgenev's interest in Khor's character and family life is matched by an equivalent curiosity on Khor's part; their mutual ignorance is sufficient comment in itself on the division which exists between master and peasant. Such comments as Turgenev's about the conviction, derived from his talk with Khor, 'that Peter the Great was predominantly Russian in his national characteristics', or Khor's caginess when Turgenev taxes him on the subject of purchasing his freedom are further reminders of the divisive half-truths, even illusions, which make communication and understanding between the classes so difficult. In other words, Turgenev's conviction that the Russian peasantry can be used as an argument in favour of Westernism seems to be as much special pleading based on ignorance or first impressions as is Khor's apprehension that he would tend to lose his individuality when he became free. It is, in fact, rare for Turgenev to attempt to argue or, in a strict sense, converse with the peasants; he is content to prompt them into speaking about themselves, framing the encounter and recorded speech with passages of commentary or description which establish both the circumstances and the atmosphere, though this framework also tends to objectivize and, in so doing, to distance the human appeal of the encounter. It is a distancing, of course, which usually has the effect of making the casual encounter seem doubly significant, as though a lyric poem had been born of an anecdote, a work of art from a snapshot. But the distance, let it not be forgotten, is really due to ignorance.
The simple, almost anecdotal charm of the first Sketch is followed by the more explicitly condemnatory tone of Yermolay and the Miller's Wife (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847). Zverkov's attitude towards the peasantry, especially in regard to Arina, is the nub of this episode. The reader is not explicitly asked to contrast Turgenev's attitude to Yermolay with Zverkov's treatment of Arina, but this is the most likely moral to be drawn: it lays bare at one stroke the inhumanity of the system. Arina seems to have been based on fact, for Turgenev's mother apparently treated one of her maidservants in a similar fashion. Yermolay, Turgenev's frequent hunting companion, is also drawn from life - a serf Afanasy Alifanov, belonging to one of Turgenev's neighbours. Turgenev purchased his freedom and later gave material help to his family (though Yermolay is not endowed with a family in this Sketch). Descendants of Alifanov (Yermolay) still live at Spasskoye, or so it was reported in 1955.
The realism of Turgenev's manner, whether it be taken as respect for the observed fact or, in a more special sense, as the ability to focus the lens of his writer's eye with such precision that the subject acquires a dramatic immediacy, is admirably illustrated by Bezhin Lea (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1851) The opening description of the July day is an example of Turgenev at his most brilliant. A special magic haunts the picture that Turgenev offers us and suggests that such beautiful July days are a part of innocence, of boyhood, clothed in the magic of recollection. The reality, then, is the night in which Turgenev encounters the peasant boys around their fires, hears their stories of hauntings and darkenings of the Sun. Serfdom here is -not represented as a problem of social relationships; it is a presence, like the darkness, surrounding and enclosing the boys' lives. The drama of flickering firelight and darkness has a quality of sorcery that illuminates darkness and light in the boys' minds, dramatically holds them in the writer's eye, photographs them for ever for the reader's gaze. Then, after the mystery of the night's experience, comes the splendour of the morning and Turgenev's always clear-minded insistence on the ephemerality of life with the announcement that Pavlusha had been killed in falling from a horse. The colour words, the visual richness, the simplicity of the anecdote so magnificently recreated and the finely etched characterizations of the boys leave a residue of wonder.
Equally rich in descriptive detail is the story of Turgenev's meeting with Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands (The Contemporary, No. 3, 1851). Kasyan, supposedly an adherent of some unnamed religious sect, is one of the most remarkable peasant portraits in these Sketches. His quasi-biblical speech is the vehicle not only for a protest against the shedding of blood; it is also-a means of expressing his own repudiation of established society in the name of that dream-world of folklore 'where no leaves fall from the trees in winter, nor in the autumn neither, and golden apples do grow on silver branches and each man lives in contentment and justice with another'. But this Sketch, composed at a time when Turgenev's proselytizing Westernism had been somewhat modified as a result of the Paris revolution in 1848 is not as explicit a plea for justice as is Bailiff (The Contemporary, No. 10, 1847). Bailiff was written in May and June of 1847, though the final place and dating which Turgenev gave to it (Salzbrunn, in Silesia, July 1847) was his way of acknowledging agreement with the sentiments expressed by Belinsky in his famous Letter to Gogol. Belinsky, convalescing at Salzbrunn, wrotehis letter in violent reaction against the obscurantist Slavophil ideas which Gogol had professed in a curious work entitled Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends. Turgenev was in Salzbrunn during part of Belinsky's convalescence, and the latter's plea for justice in Russian social and -political life, as expressed in the Letter to Gogol, later became Turgenev's sole religious and political credo. Of all the Sketches which Turgenev wrote, Bailiff, with its exquisitely savage portrait of the foppish tyrant Penochkin and its equally acute study of his bailiff, is by far the most outspoken attack on the exploitation of the peasantry. A month or so later, in August 1847, he also probably wrote Two Landowners, which provides more evidence of the sickeningly callous treatment meted out by landowners to their serfs. Possibly because this Sketch was so critical, Turgenev did not publish it separately but included it among his collection of Sketches when they were first published as a separate edition in 1852.
The value of these Sketches as socio-political tracts for the times hardly needs to be emphasized. Their effect was such that they made a very real contribution to the movement for emancipating the serfs after the Crimean War. Yet they are probably better understood nowadays as one of the stages in Turgenev's development as a writer, revealing some of the themes and motifs which recur so frequently in his work and imbue it with a significance that is as much philosophical as social or political. Death (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848), for example, implies clearly enough that there is another kind of injustice apart from the injustice of social inequality. The isolation of the human personality in relation to nature and eternity exercised Turgenev more deeply, in the final analysis, than did the social or political issues of his time. Death illustrates his concern for the way peasants die, with no particular emphasis laid on the morbid aspects of such a subject; but it illustrates more clearly the compassion that he feels for the wretched Avenir, the 'eternal student', whose sensitive, enthusiastic nature proves to be as superfluous 'in life as it is in context of Russian society. Viewed in relation to its essentially ephemeral character, as Turgenev undoubtedly viewed it, the human personality becomes valuable for the beauty which it exhibits in life.
Beauty is the theme of Singers (The Contemporary, No. 11, 1850) in the sense that it is the beauty of Yakov's singing which so touches the hearts of his listeners that he is universally acknowledged to be the winner of the competition. Such beauty, though, is no more than momentary. Turgenev chanced upon it in taking refuge from the heat of the day and refused to idealize the episode by omitting the drunken scene at the end. Apart from depicting the peasants as endowed with a culture of their own, this Sketch seizes upon a moment of epiphany in which Yakov's singing and the tearful desperation of the boy's final cries seem to embrace the full range of peasant heartache. Unlike Singers, though first published simultaneously, Meeting deals explicitly with an emotional problem and is the only attempt Turgenev made in his Sketches to describe such emotions among the peasantry. The glitter of the natural scene at the beginning reflects and sets in relief the expectations of the peasant girl awaiting her lover, just as the final breath of autumn is an orchestration of her tears, but for once the touch is a shade too sentimental, the artlessness betrays a shade too much of the artifice that contributed to its making.
Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849) is a study in the Hamletism of Turgenev's own generation. As an anatomy of provincial society, the opening description of the dignitary's arrival and the ensuing dinner is one of the most uproariously sardonic passages to be found anywhere in Turgenev's work, matching, if on a more sophisticated and therefore less obtrusive level, the most satirical passages in Gogol. The anonymous Hamlet's recital of misfortunes and misalliances which follows may be considered equally sardonic in tone, but in the end, as the wretched Vasily Vasilyevych sticks his tongue out at himself in the mirror, the tragedy of his superfluity reflects the tragic loss of illusions and fond hopes experienced by Turgenev's generation. The preoccupation with self so characteristic of this Hamlet cannot fail to be comic, but his final reconciliation is in its own way as bitter an acceptance of social inequality as is the peas ant's subservience to his master.
It is a short step to another study in reconciliation and acceptance, although in the case of Living Relic, which first appeared twenty-five years later, in 1874, in a collection of stories published to raise funds for famine victims in the Samara Province, the tone is not sardonic but religious, and the reconciliation of Lukeria to her travail is that of a saint enduring a solitary martyrdom. None of Turgenev's Sketches is more beautiful or moving than this lucidly simple portrait. Lukeria's humble, philosophical acceptance of misfortune must in part be due to Turgenev's pessimistic view that life involved such submission to fate. This readiness to submit, so characteristic of Turgenev himself and of so many of his fictional characters, forms the crux of another Sketch first published in 1874, Clatter of Wheels. Though Turgenev's fears prove to be unfounded at the moment of crisis, the Sketch has a nice blend of humour and tension interlaced with characteristic passages of nature description. Finally, Forest and Steppe (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849), which was always the concluding piece in the several editions of the Sketches to appear during Turgenev's lifetime, reminds us that the hunter's milieu was the forest regions, not the 'limitless, enormous steppe no eye can encompass'.
The Appendix contains translations of two fragments first published in 1964 (Literaturnoye nasledstvo, Vol. 73, bk. 1) which relate to 1847 and 1848 and in combination - it is assumed that Turgenev intended to combine them - would probably have proved to be as outspokenly critical as Bailiff or Two Landowners. As it is, these fragments are interesting for their terse and pungent thumbnail sketches of two different types of despotic landowner. The Russian German perhaps also helps to explain something that may seem puzzling to a twentieth-century English reader - namely, the ease with which Turgenev was able to range far and wide on his hunting trips without any apparent fear of trespassing on other people's property. His assumption of such a prerogative is one mark of the time-span that separates his age from ours.
Regardless of the fact that these Sketches belong to an age that is now quite remote, the wryly humorous detachment, visual honesty and poetic sensibility with which Turgenev imbued them have served to maintain the freshness and distinction of their literary appeal. In his novels, especially Fathers and Children, he was no doubt to achieve greater things, but his Sketches were his first major achievement. He was aware both of their value and their imperfections, as we know from a letter that he wrote to his friend Annenkov in 1852: