Starter kit for Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches
Sometimes we just start again. It's 45 years since I've read anything by Turgenev. But there we are, A Sportsman's Sketches is on Gutenberg in Constance Garnett's 1895 translation, which is divided into two volumes.
Volume 1:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8597/pg8597-images.html
Volume 2:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8744/8744-h/8744-h.htm
Here's the Russian text:
Our extract begins with the sportsman and his companions up to their necks in water, after the sinking of Sutchok's punt.
'I will go and find the ford,' continued Yermolaï, as though there must infallibly be a ford in every pond: he took the pole from Sutchok, and went off in the direction of the bank, warily sounding the depth as he walked.
'Can you swim?' I asked him.
'No, I can't,' his voice sounded from behind the reeds.
'Then he'll be drowned,' remarked Sutchok indifferently. He had been terrified at first, not by the danger, but through fear of our anger, and now, completely reassured, he drew a long breath from time to time, and seemed not to be aware of any necessity for moving from his present position.
'And he will perish without doing any good,' added Vladimir piteously.
Yermolaï did not return for more than an hour. That hour seemed an eternity to us. At first we kept calling to him very energetically; then his answering shouts grew less frequent; at last he was completely silent. The bells in the village began ringing for evening service. There was not much conversation between us; indeed, we tried not to look at one another. The ducks hovered over our heads; some seemed disposed to settle near us, but suddenly rose up into the air and flew away quacking. We began to grow numb. Sutchok shut his eyes as though he were disposing himself to sleep.
At last, to our indescribable delight, Yermolaï returned.
'Well?'
'I have been to the bank; I have found the ford…. Let us go.'
We wanted to set off at once; but he first brought some string out of his pocket out of the water, tied the slaughtered ducks together by their legs, took both ends in his teeth, and moved slowly forward; Vladimir came behind him, and I behind Vladimir, and Sutchok brought up the rear. It was about two hundred paces to the bank. Yermolaï walked boldly and without stopping (so well had he noted the track), only occasionally crying out: 'More to the left—there's a hole here to the right!' or 'Keep to the right—you'll sink in there to the left….' Sometimes the water was up to our necks, and twice poor Sutchok, who was shorter than all the rest of us, got a mouthful and spluttered. 'Come, come, come!' Yermolaï shouted roughly to him—and Sutchok, scrambling, hopping and skipping, managed to reach a shallower place, but even in his greatest extremity was never so bold as to clutch at the skirt of my coat. Worn out, muddy and wet, we at last reached the bank.
Two hours later we were all sitting, as dry as circumstances would allow, in a large hay barn, preparing for supper. The coachman Yehudiil, an exceedingly deliberate man, heavy in gait, cautious and sleepy, stood at the entrance, zealously plying Sutchok with snuff (I have noticed that coachmen in Russia very quickly make friends); Sutchok was taking snuff with frenzied energy, in quantities to make him ill; he was spitting, sneezing, and apparently enjoying himself greatly. Vladimir had assumed an air of languor; he leaned his head on one side, and spoke little. Yermolaï was cleaning our guns. The dogs were wagging their tails at a great rate in the expectation of porridge; the horses were stamping and neighing in the out-house…. The sun had set; its last rays were broken up into broad tracts of purple; golden clouds were drawn out over the heavens into finer and ever finer threads, like a fleece washed and combed out. … There was the sound of singing in the village.
(End of #7 (Lgov))
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| Illustration for "Lgov" by Pyotr Sokolov |
[Image source: Wikipedia .]
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16. Death
17. The Singers
18. Piotr Petrovich Karataev
19. The Tryst
20. The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District
21. Tchertop-Hanov and Nedopyuskin
22. The End of Tchertop-Hanov
23. A Living Relic
24. The Rattling of Wheels
25. Epilogue: The Forest and the Steppe
A Sportsman's Sketches was published in 1852, collecting 22 pieces that had nearly all been published in Nekrasov's magazine Sovremennik (The Contemporary) during the previous five years.
[The only exception, I think, was "Two country gentlemen", written (like much of the collection) in 1847 but not published until now. Possibly the ending was too nakedly political for the magazine editors.]
In this 1852 version, the contents consisted of #1 - #21 and #25.
Twenty years later, Turgenev wrote and added three more pieces:
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| Trying to work all this out! |
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I thought my reading choice would be tasteful but light entertainment but of course that's wrong. Under the hood the sportsman's sketches are a devastating portrait of rural Russia during the serfdom era. Both the terrible ill-treatment of the peasants, and the corrupting effect on the landowners' outlook, are unsparingly portrayed. (This most toxic and dehumanizing phase of Russian serfdom was a relatively recent development; since the early 18th century really. Like chattel slavery in America it had attained a new level of ruthlessness.)
If Turgenev's book really contributed to the Czar's decision to abolish serfdom in 1861, then it's one of the most historically significant of literary fictions. Though there were other causes (e.g. Russia's ignominious defeat in the Crimean war.) And reform was in the air: Russia was backward, it was falling behind.... Besides, plenty of other Russian authors were idealizing the Russian peasant. Indeed Turgenev rather stands out for his restraint, his melancholy realism, his sense of limits. His sportsman may have access to the life of the country like no-one else of his class, but he's still an outsider.
Anyway the czar left it to the landowners to organize abolition. They kept the best two thirds of the land, the ex-serfs had the worst third. The landowners were compensated, the ex-serfs had to pay. Since the ex-serfs had no money, their payment was in labour. So the best land still got worked for the landowner, while the wretched land from which the peasants were supposed to draw a subsistence lay neglected. In many ways their lives got even harder.
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I've been looking up some basic information to assist my reading. I'll share my "research" (i.e. web searches) though I don't suppose it'll be much use to anyone else. In my youth I read thousands of pages of 19th-century Russian literature without ever bothering to understand these things, but now I want to.
Kvas, kvass:
Popular beverage in the rye belt of Russia and Eastern Europe. The main ingredient is rye; it is top-fermented but has little alcohol (<1.5%) or even none. Comparable to Sweden's once-popular svagdricka (weak drink), which my great-grandfather Karl used to haul up and down the Baltic coast.
Preference:
A card game, mentioned frequently. Still played in Russia, but the height of its popularity was in the 1850s. A three-player game with contracts and tricks. Uses a piquet pack (32 cards). Reminds me of solo whist, but more complicated. Also played in other variants across Eastern Europe. The Swedish version was called Priffe.
Wormwood:
In his nature descriptions Turgenev often mentions it as an aromatic wild plant. Wormwood is Artemisia absinthium. Probably that's what Turgenev was talking about, but I wondered momentarily if he might have meant Artemisia vulgaris (Mugwort), another fragrant plant. (You may have heard that "Chernobyl" means mugwort in Ukrainian.) This thought may have been prompted by mugwort being much more common than wormwood in southern England!
Verst:
A verst is basically a kilometer (1.0668kms, to be precise). Constance Garnett translates verst as mile, which is not very accurate.
Broken-winded (horse):
A horse condition aka recurrent airway obstruction, characterized by increased effort to breathe. Comparable to human COPD, it is an allergic reaction. Typically caused by dust or mould spores and associated with horses fed on hay or bedded on straw (though as with other allergic reactions it only affects certain individuals). Limits a horse's ability to work.
Little Russia, Great Russia:
Commonplace terms in the 19th century, but less so since 1917.
The former term refers, broadly, to Ukraine. The latter term refers, broadly, to what we now call Russia. Another term was "White Russia", referring to Belarus.
For Turgenev, growing up in and writing about the Oryol region, south-west of Moscow and not far from Ukraine, these were useful everyday terms.
Today "Little Russia" is a controversial term likely to cause offense.
The steppes:
The Eurasian or Great Steppe is a more or less uninterrupted band of semi-arid grassland stretching all the way from Hungary to Manchuria. The segment relevant to Turgenev's book is known as the Western Steppe.
The steppe region in its strict sense supports scrub but not the formation of forests, due to insufficient moisture.
Today almost all of the Western Steppe is under the plough, and is used to grow arable crops. The most dramatic expansion of agriculture was in the 1950s. There are only a few scattered reserves of "virgin steppe".
This is the distant country mentioned by Kassyan: "And beyond Kursk come the steppes, that steppes-country: ah, what a marvel, what a delight for man! what freedom, what a blessing of God!" (#9 Kassyan of Fair Springs).
The book's locations, typically in the countryside around Oryol and Tula, lie well to the north of the Western Steppe. They are in an intermediate region that geographers sometimes call forest-steppe, where steppe grassland is interspersed with e.g. oak-wood. So Turgenev usually uses the term "steppe" to mean grassland in contrast to forest (e.g. #25 Epilogue: The Forest and the Steppe). He describes Lgov (#7) as a steppe village, though it's on a swampy river. The steppe village of #17 (The Singers) is an upland village, though it's only three miles from the narrator's home.
[Contrary to Wikipedia, Turgenev's Lgov is clearly not based on the cathedral town on the river Seym west of Kursk. Other placenames in the story (Bolhov, Karatchev) suggest that he was thinking of the village called Lgov in western Oryol Oblast. But even so, Turgenev only borrowed the name; the topographical details don't match up. His book's villages and estates aren't intended to be precisely identifiable, as is normal in fiction.]
Nightingales:
Commonly mentioned in the nature descriptions. We also learn that people liked to keep them in cages, and hence it was possible to make a precarious living by catching them.
The nightingales of Kursk were proverbially the best singers. Hence "piping like a Kursk nightingale". [Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the opera singer and Cheka spy, was nicknamed the Kursk Nightingale.]
Picture to yourselves, gentle readers, a stout, tall man of seventy, with a face reminding one somewhat of the face of Kriloff, clear and intelligent eyes under overhanging brows, dignified in bearing, slow in speech, and deliberate in movement: there you have Ovsyanikov. (#6 The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov):
The reference is to Ivan Andreyevitch Krylov (1769 - 1844), whose fables (1809 - 1836) made him famous throughout Russia. He had a reputation for indolence as well as wisdom. He was also fierce against modern fashions and strongly attached to old Russian ways; the sportsman mistakenly assumes that Ovsyanikov will be like that too.
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| Ivan Krylov, 1839 portrait by Karl Briullov |
[Image source: Wikipedia.]
You can read Krylov's fables here (in W. R.S. Ralston's prose translation):
http://www.pierssen.com/cfile/kahf.html#f049
I had once had a brother knocking about, with the English disease in his neck, but he soon died . . . (#20, The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District):
The "English disease" is rickets. Daniel Whistler, the first physician to describe it, found it invariably fatal in infancy, and often fatal later. "When the neck can scarcely support the head they seldom survive" (see https://www.jstor.org/stable/24619850 .)
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| Illustration for #18 (Piotr Petrovich Karataev) by Pyotr Sokolov |
[Image source: Wikimedia Commons .]
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A Sportsman's Sketches feels like quite a seminal book in Russian literature but of course it isn't that simple. The book was published in 1852, though many would have read individual stories in magazines from 1847 onwards.
Anyway, what books had Russian readers already read? Here's some notable predecessors:
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Записки охотника
Zapiski Okhotnika ... : that's the title in Russian. It means Notes of a hunter, or A hunter's notes. "Zapiski" (= notes) is exactly the same word as in Dostoevsky's title Notes from Underground.
Constance Garnett gave the title as A Sportsman's Sketches. More recently it has even been rendered as Sketches from a Hunter's Album. As far as I can see this idea of sketches is an invention of the English translators. "Zapiski" means notes, e.g. short letters, or memoirs, but there's no pictorial connotation. (In French the book is known as Mémoires d'un chasseur.)
I wouldn't wish away any part of A Sportsman's Sketches, but I'm surely not alone in finding it quite an uneven reading experience. #2 (Yermolaï and the Miller's Wife) seems to me just a perfect short story; not a word wasted and everything contributing to its stunning impact. But what about #6 (The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov)? It certainly packs a punch too: the tale about the narrator's own grandfather is one of the book's unforgettable pages. But after that the story seems to become an elongated ramble, moving on to other landowners of the past, landowners of the present, the activism of Osvyanikov's son ... the names of people we'll never hear of again pass back and forth, our attention wanders. Most inconsequently of all, the medley ends with the shoehorned story of Frantz Ivanitch Lejeune, a French drummer boy left behind by Napoleon who escaped drowning and ascended to the Russian nobility. Turgenev's mock-apology to the reader seems to acknowledge that he's pushed it a bit.
This accommodating quality of the fictional memoirs is clearly important. We're invited to picture our sportsman spontaneously writing his unfiltered notes -- things he's heard or seen -- without troubling to decide what interest they may or may not have.
So even in #7 (Lgov), another perfectly concentrated story (and with something tragic at its heart, for all its comedy) -- even here, we find the sportsman taking the trouble to note down the details of the inscription about the Vicomte de Blanchy in the churchyard.
So Turgenev plays off the expectation of everything being relevant (e.g. in a literary work such as a short story) against his fictional setting of a sportsman jotting down random notes.
In #8 (Byezhin Prairie) our sportsman pretends to be asleep -- a common motif -- while he listens in to the chatter of the peasant boys. It's realism ... just such spooky tales as boys would recount during a night in the wilds; their way of talking and limited vocabulary, the resort to physical gestures, the boys wandering off the point and forgetting to finish the tale they began... But behind the ramble readers can find a deeper unity if they want to, faintly preluded by the lost sportsman nearly stepping off a precipice; the boys' trying to make sense of their difficult, chancy peasant existences, in which death and catastrophe are never far off; both mocking and supportive of each other, both afraid and brave, both innocent and too experienced.
Ratik Asokan's introduction:
https://4columns.org/asokan-ratik/a-sportsmans-notebook
Labels: Ivan Turgenev
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