A SPORTSMAN'S NOTEBOOK (398 pp.)—Ivan Turgenev, translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn — Chanticleer ($2).
A century ago these lyrical sketches of Russian country life were considered an incendiary call for the abolition of Russian serfdom. When the book first appeared in 1852, the czar's advisers strongly warned lim against it. But Alexander II read the book and later admitted that it had indeed helped persuade him to free the serfs.
Republished for the first time in 18 years (in a new translation), A Sports man's Notebook now seems far removed from all such flaming issues, and the brutality of the feudal masters whom Turgenevshyly rebukes can hardly shock a world accustomed to far darker examples of Russian tyranny. Though Turgenev's motive in writing it was to atone for the extreme cruelty with which his mother had treated her serfs, what shines through after all these years is the author's intense love for the Russian land, the Russian tongue and the Russian character.
"The Master Is the Master." Unlike his contemporaries, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev was a "Westerner," and he he thought Russia should copy the ways of of the industrialized West. Many of his novels, e.g., Fathers and Sons, Rudin, revolve around the political experiences of young Russian intellectuals discontented with czarism — and with the melancholy aftermaths of their disappointed loves. But his first prose work, and his best, lives on as a radiant example of pastoral charm that often overshadows Turgenev's concern for social injustice.
Through A Sportsman's Notebook wanders a central character, a game hunter who is presumably Turgenev himself. Gradually he comes to know the masters and peasants, the clerks and traders of the neighborhood in which he shoots. The sketches begin and end on a hushed note, soft with the echoes of a summer day in the forest. Turgenev makes his points mutely rather than melodramatically.
He meets an unhappy woman whose husband bought her "freedom" from serfdom — but also tore her away from her lover, who remains a slave. At the house of a neighbor he watches the owner mercilessly bleed his peasants while affecting the most cultivated French manners. And another time a landowner tells him: "As I see it, the master is the master, and the peasant is the peasant... and that's all there is to it."
"The Sweetest Thing." These little sorties against the social system give Turgenev the opportunity for digging deeply into human motives and habits. The profligate landowners, the simpering clerks, the passionate but suppressed girls whom Turgenev paints are universal types, recognizable in any environment. And some of his best stories have nothing to do with serfdom: The Singers, a rousing account of a singing duel between a peasant and a tradesman which ends in a drunken debauch, and Bezhin Meadow, a tender portrait of a group of boys whom the sportsman meets one evening.