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A young landowner goes hunting across the forests and fields of central Russia and records the people he meets: peasants, millers, coachmen, singers, small…
A young landowner goes hunting across the forests and fields of central Russia and records the people he meets: peasants, millers, coachmen, singers, small landowners and their serfs. In 'Bezhin Meadow' he spends a night by a fire listening to village boys tell ghost stories; in 'The Singers' a tavern holds its breath for a song contest.
Context and significance
Published as a book in 1852, these sketches showed serfs as thinking, feeling human beings, and they are said to have influenced Tsar Alexander II, who abolished serfdom in 1861. They are also some of the most beautiful nature writing in Russian. Turgenev's major novel is Fathers and Sons.
About the author
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.
He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.