Radilov’s dilemma, though similarly emotional, has in ‘My Neighbour Radilov’ (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847) a more complex ethical meaning. Inexplicit as an issue in the story but essential for its understanding is the fact that the Orthodox Church proscribed marriage between a husband and his sister-in-law, which in Radilov’s case meant that he was not permitted to marry Olga. The complication of her supposed envy towards her sister and Radilov’s secretive, if outwardly, bland character (totally devoid of the trivial passions that commonly beset Russian landowners, as Turgenev amusingly enumerates them) suggests some of the hidden tensions and tragedies present in the life of the poorer nobility. They scarcely compare, however, with the more explicit problems raised by Farmer Ovsyanikov (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847), a figure who by social standing and inclination has a role roughly similar to Turgenev’s in his observation of the life around him. Pithy, strong-minded and wise, Ovsyanikov is an ideal channel for conveying critical attitudes towards serfdom without courting the danger of censorship. An eighteenth-century personality who admires the past while remaining clear-eyed about the beneficial and negative aspects of the present, he is, in terms of characterization, among the most fully drawn and vivid of the types depicted in the Sketches, even though he does no more than sit and talk. ‘Lgov’ (The Contemporary, No. 5, 1847) offers two equally vivid portraits, those of the pretentious hunter Vladimir with his injured chin and forefinger and Old Knot (Suchok), the peasant who had been given a range of fatuous employments and names at the whims of his various masters and mistresses. As a whole, this story is a brilliant account of a disastrous duck-shooting expedition that simultaneously exposes the disastrous effects of arbitrary power, whether of man over man or man over nature.
The realism of Turgenev’s manner, in the sense that it respects the observed fact or in the more special sense that it so focuses the lens of the writer’s eye that it endows the subject with a dramatic immediacy, is splendidly illustrated by ‘Bezhin Lea’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1851). The opening description of a 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 the 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 encounter 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 date 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, wrote his letter in violent reaction against the obscurantist Slavophile ideas that 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 ‘Bailiff’, with its exquisitely savage portrait of the foppish tyrant Penochkin and its equally acute study of his bailiff, contains by far the most outspoken attack on the exploitation of the peasantry.
The following three Sketches provide further examples of such exploitation through exposing the disguises used by landowners to conceal their tyranny. The creation of ‘offices’ of the kind described in ‘The Office’ (The Contemporary, No. 10, 1847) proved popular with Russian landowners as a means of controlling their peasantry through a bureaucratic hierarchy of clerks and petty officials. The opportunity for bribery and corruption in such circumstances is amply demonstrated by this Sketch, in which the narrator’s role is made so neutral by his eavesdropping that the whole story has a dramatic, documentary realism to it. This is not the only example of the narrator as eavesdropper, but in this case the non-participant role clearly involves a withdrawal of sympathy. In ‘Loner’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848), by contrast, the portrait of the giant peasant forester with the superb physique and fearsome reputation is projected with the greatest sympathy. This is a rare instance of Turgenev as narrator actually being admitted into the home-life of the peasantry. The scene of poverty he encounters in the peasant’s hut, as well as in the suppressed but, for all that, very real distress of the motherless daughter and baby, has a poignant and vivid strength to it. The fact that the powerful peasant should be single-mindedly pursuing his guardianship of the forest to the detriment of other peasants, though no doubt in the interests of true conservationism, is tragically ironic. The actual beneficiary of the Loner’s zeal is absent from the picture. Not so in the case of ‘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 originally in The Contemporary but included it among his collection of Sketches when they were first published as a separate edition in 1852.
The crudities of Russian provincial society figure prominently in the next Sketches (both published first in The Contemporary, No. 2, 1848). Here the tone, particularly in ‘Lebedyan’, yields to a mocking, sardonic manner which highlights the rumbustious, if colourful, coarseness and double-dealing of the provincial horse fair. Khlopakov’s reiteration of his supposedly funny nonsense words compares ironically with the unctuous pieties of the unscrupulous horse-dealer Chernobay: Turgenev’s observant, tight-lipped description of both types is masterly in its sarcasm. As for ‘Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew’ this light-hearted Sketch may confound the reader by the gradual reversal of sympathies which occurs when the boorish, insensitive nephew returns to his aunt’s house. Turgenev uses the work as much as anything as a vehicle for pouring scorn on the artistic standards and tastes of his day.
Despite the sardonic tone of some of them, 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 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 injusti
ce 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. It illustrates even 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 the 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 that so touches the hearts of his listeners that he is universally acknowledged to be the winner of the competition. It is, of course, a fleeting beauty. 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.
Heartache, along with a gradual deepening of the emotional content of the Sketches, characterizes both ‘Pyotr Petrovich Karataev’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1847) and ‘Meeting’, if from wholly different social points of view. Karataev’s ruinous love for the peasant girl Matryona, offered as an internal narrative, echoes Radilov’s dilemma and anticipates in some ways Chertopkhanov’s, though Karataev is in every respect the most deeply affected and the most articulate of those members of the landowning class who fall victim to serfdom’s rigid division between the classes. An ordinary but companionable fellow, he finds that his hopeless love for Matryona turns him into both heartbroken flotsam and deceived lover whose feelings of protest and revenge have echoes in the soliloquies of Hamlet. ‘Meeting’ (The Contemporary, No. 11, 1850) deals explicitly with peasant emotion, observed from outside, as it were, 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 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 descriptions to be found in Turgenev’s work. The anonymous Hamlet’s subsequent recital of misfortunes and misalliances mixes the tragic and the comic in a narrative that explores what he refers to as ‘the extreme limit of unhappiness’. By the time he sticks his tongue out at himself in the mirror it is clear that the tragedy of his superfluity reflects the tragic loss of illusions and fond hopes experienced by Turgenev’s generation as a whole. The Hamlet’s preoccupation with self has comic aspects to it, but his final reconciliation is in its own way as bitter an acceptance of social inequality and complete obliteration of individuality as is the peasant’s subservience to his master.
The independence of the ‘loner’, of the man, no matter what his social status or role, who opts for such freedom as he can obtain within the limits of the system evidently appealed to Turgenev and no figure in the Sketches exemplifies such independence better than Chertopkhanov. He made his first appearance in ‘Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin’ (The Contemporary, No. 2, 1849). His dashing, colourful personality, so naturally inclined to protect the weak and vulnerable, as he shows in the patronage which he extends to the unfortunate Nedopyuskin, has an eccentric side to it that may antagonize as much as it can endear. In general the issue of serfdom here slips into the background and is replaced by a study of bachelorhood. The curious little ménage cultivated by the two bachelors, Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin, has an idyllic appeal. It seems, among these Sketches, as nearly ideal a condition as can be imagined. But the story of Chertopkhanov was not destined to end there. In 1872 Turgenev published a sequel ‘The End of Chertopkhanov’ (The Herald of Europe, No. 11) in which he not only dispensed with the device of narrator but he also adopted a looser, chronicle manner in telling the story of Chertopkhanov’s last years and death. In style and content, therefore, this work scarcely seems to form an organic part of the Sketches. It is the longest of them and among the most pessimistic. Divided into short chapters, it traces the slow decline of Chertopkhanov after his abandonment by Masha and the death of his bosom friend. Though the wonder horse Malek Adel becomes the treasured companion of his bachelorhood, the doubts in Chertopkhanov’s mind surrounding the ‘second’ Malek Adel seem to reinforce a sense that his eccentricity, like his fanatical pride, has a self-destructive edge to it. The story is noteworthy for its sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish horse-dealer Moshel Leiba, a second beneficiary of Chertopkhanov’s love of justice, yet the portrayal of the central figure himself as doomed by his own self-delusion and doubts fails on the whole to sustain his tragic image to a successful conclusion.
No Sketch is more poignant or beautiful than ‘Living Relic’. It first appeared in 1874 in a collection of stories published to raise funds for famine victims in the Samara Province. The lucidly simple portrait of the peasant woman Lukeria who religiously endures the long travail of her illness evokes the image of a saint enduring a solitary martyrdom. The comparison with Joan of Arc does not aggrandize her fate. Lukeria’s humble, philosophical acceptance of misfortune reflects Turgenev’s pessimistic view, increasingly marked in his later years, that life must involve such submission to fate. This readiness to submit forms the crux of another Sketch first published in 1874, ‘Clatter of Wheels’. Though the narrator’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 that appeared 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 two fragments first published in 1964 which in their finished form would probably have proved to be as outspokenly critical as any of the completed Sketches. In their existing form the fragments are interesting for their terse and pungent thumbnail portraits of two different types of despotic landowner. ‘The Russian German’ perhaps also helps to explain something that may seem puzzling to a twentieth-century reader – namely the ease with which Turgenev was able to range far and wide on his hunting trips. That he had so little fear of trespassing is one mark of the time-span that separates his age from ours. It is also, of course, the hallmark of these hunting memoirs of his in which he, the footloose, supposedly free-ranging hunter, chooses for the greater part to depict the equally footloose, supposedly unattached peasantry, ‘superfluous’ after their fashion within the serf system. They are his hunter’s ‘prey’; but they are not the ‘sitting ducks’ that the landowners are once they come within range of Turgenev’s hunter’s eye. The latter, immured in their homes as in their internal narratives, are picked off more easily and more wickedly and with greater understanding than are the fleeting portrayals of the peasantry, so often caught casually but brilliantly on the wing.
Although these Sketches belong to an age that is now quite remote, the wryly humorous detachment, visual honesty and poetic sensibility with which Turgenev endowed them have served to maintain the freshness and distinction of their literary appeal. In his novels, especially Fathers and Sons, he was no doubt to achieve greater things, but his Sketches wer
e 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:
I am glad that this book has come out; it seems to me that it will remain my mite cast into the treasure-chest of Russian literature, to use the phraseology of the schoolbook… Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it’s not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the whole book.
Turgenev’s verdict, though understandably erring on the critical side, has proved to be a just one. A translator can only hope that he has been able to reveal the justice of it in his translation, despite the many temptations placed in his way to oversalt or undercook the poetry, simplicity, irony and beauty of the original Russian.
KHOR AND KALINYCH
WHOEVER has happened to travel from Bolkhov County into the Zhizdra1 region will no doubt have been struck by the sharp differences between the nature of the people in the Oryol Province and those in Kaluga. The Oryol peasant is a man of little stature, round-shouldered, gloomy, given to looking at you from under his brows and used to living in miserable huts of aspen wood, working on the corvée2 principle, taking no part in trade, eating poorly and wearing bast shoes; whereas the Kaluga peasant, who pays quit-rent, is used to living in spacious fir huts, has a tall build, looks at you boldly and merrily with a clean, clear complexion, trades in grease and tar and wears boots on feast days. An Oryol village (I am talking about the eastern part of the Oryol Province) is usually situated among ploughed fields and close to a ravine which has somehow or other been transformed into a muddy pond. Apart from some wild broom, which is always ready to hand, and a couple of emaciated birches, there won’t be a tree visible for miles and hut will nestle against hut, the roofs strewn with rotten straw. A Kaluga village, on the other hand, will be surrounded for the most part by woodland; the huts, more independent of each other and straighter, are roofed with boards; the gates can be tightly closed, the wattle-fencing round the yard has not collapsed and fallen inwards to offer an open door to any passing pig. And for the hunter the Kaluga Province provides more in the way of game. In the Oryol Province the last areas of woodland and ‘plazas’* will disappear in five years or so, and there is no marshland whatever; while in the Kaluga Province wooded areas stretch for hundreds, and marshland for dozens, of miles, and that noble bird, the grouse, still thrives, the great-hearted snipe is plenteous and the noisy partridge both delights and frightens the hunter and his dog with its explosive flight from cover.