In writing "Sketches from a Hunter's Album", Turgenev probably did more to lead to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 than anyone else; I liken the effect to Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in America.

Most of the stories were written between 1847 and 1851 while Turgenev was outside Russia; as noted by many he was a "Westernizer" in the vein of Peter the Great, fundamentally believing that Russia needed to be modernized in the manner of Europe.

Turgenev does not sermonize in these stories, he merely holds a mirror up to the conditions of the serfs and life in general at this time. Whether he did so to avoid the censor or not, the result is a degree of artistic restraint, despite the message he was clearly conveying. Even with the restraint, he was arrested and exiled to his estate in 1852 after the first full volume was published.

Ironically,Turgenev came from a rich family; his mother ruled over 5000 serfs and was as cruel to them as Arina was treated in the story "Yermolay and the Miller's Wife". Turgenev himself also "came of age" as many of the gentry did in that day, by having sex with with serf girls and apparently having children by two of them.

Themes of cruelty to the serfs are prevalent in the stories, examples of which are:
- The humiliating treatment of the young chambermaid ("Yermolay and the Miller's Wife") and cruelty as seen through the serf's eyes ("Raspberry Water")
- The taking away of free choice ("Lgov")
- Resettlement ("Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands")
- The effect of poverty on the serfs ("Loner); one family broken and another forced to steal
- The cruelty of an old mistress to deny a peasant girl love by a sheer whim ("Pyotr Petrovich Karataev")
- The cruelty and humiliation of landowners to serfs ("Two Landowners) and parallel cruelty of serfs to animals ("Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin")

Also depicted is the somewhat brutal nature of life inherent to this time period, anong other things including the beating up Jews ("The End of Chertopkhanov"), "drownin' a Frenchy" ("Farmer Ovsyanikov"), and the beating of women (prevalent throughout, most outrageous in "Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin", where an order is given to beat all the old women in the village).

Themes with a positive bent:
- The wisdom and individuality of the serfs ("Khor and Kalinych")
- The courage and dignity of the serfs in facing death ("Death")
- The serfs' moral superiority (Kasyan, in "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands")
- Turgenev's love of nature ("Forest and Steppe")

My favorite stories in the collection were "Yermolay and the Miller's Wife", "Lgov", "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands", and "Clatter of Wheels"

Favorite quotes:
From "District Doctor":
"Strange things happen on this earth: you can live a long while with someone and be on the friendliest of terms, and yet you'll never once talk openly with him, from the depths of you soul; while with someone else you may scarcely have met, at one glance, whether you to him or he to you, just as in a confessional, you'll blurt out the story of your life."

From "Bezhin Lea":
"The immaculate dark sky rose solemnly and endlessly high above us in all its mysterious magnificence. My lungs melted with the sweet pleasure of inhaling that special, languorous and fresh perfume which is the scent of a Russia summer night."

Also:
"Myriads of golden stars, it seemed, were all quietly flowing in glittering rivalry along the Milky Way, and in truth, while looking at them, one sensed vaguely the unwavering, unstoppable racing of the earth beneath...."

From "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands":
"You shoot the birds of the air, eh? ... And the wild animals of the forest? ... Isn't it sinful you are to be killing God's own wee birds and spilling innocent blood?"

From "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District":
"I looked at the dead face of my wife. My God! Even death, death itself, had not freed her, not healed her wound: her face wore the same sickly, timid, dumb look, as if she literally felt awkward lying in her coffin."

From "Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin":
"...the small, faded greyish windows looked out with inexpressible sourness from beneath the shaggy rim of roof drawn down over them: they were like the eyes of elderly whores."

From "Forest and Steppe":
"Your breathing is calm, though a strange anxiety invades your soul. You walk along the edge of the forest, keeping your eyes on the dog, but in the meanttime there comes to mind beloved images, beloved faces, the living and the dead, and long-since dormant impressions unexpectedly awaken; the imagination soars and dwells on the air like a bird, and everything springs into movement with such clarity and stands before the eyes. Your heart either suddenly quivers and starts beating fast, passionately racing forward, or drowns irretrievably in recollections. The whole of life unrolls easily and swiftly like a scroll; a man has possession of his whole past, all his feelings, all his powers, his entire soul. And nothing in his surroundings can disturb him - there is no sun, no wind, no noise ..."

Lastly, from "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands":
"Bored by his silence, I lay down on my back and began admiringly to watch the peaceful play of the entwined leaves against the high, clear sky. It is a remarkably pleasant occupation, to lie on one's back in a forest and look upwards! It seems that you are looking into a bottomless sea, that it is stretching out far and wide below you, that the trees are not rising from the earth but, as if they were the roots of enormous plants, are descending or falling steeply into those lucid, grassy waves....
...
Like magical underwater islands, round white clouds gently float into view and pass by, and then suddenly the whole of this sea, this radiant air, these branches and leaves suffused with sunlight, all of it suddenly begins to stream in this wind, shimmers with a fugitive brilliance, and a fresh, tremulous murmuration arises which is like the endless shallow splashing of oncoming ripples. You lie still and go on watching: words cannot express the delight and quiet, and how sweet is the feeling that creeps over your heart. You go on watching, and that deep, clear azure brings a smile to your lips as innocent as the azure itself, as innocent as the clouds passing across it, and as if in company with them there passes through your mind a slow calvalcade of happy recollections, and it seems to you that all the while your gaze is travelling farther and farther away and drawing all of you with it into that calm, shining infinity, making it impossible for you to tear yourself away from those distant heights, from those distant depths..." ( )

I got this for an odd reason -- I was teaching modern Japanese literature, and some of these stories were among the first European stories translated into Japanese. ( )

Turgenev is great. This book has astoundingly beautiful passages about nature. OK, the narrator shoots some birds, but this isn't detailed or bloody and makes up about 2% of the content. ( )

“I’ve been reading all the time down here. Turgenieff to me is the greatest writer there ever was. Didn’t write the greatest books, but was the greatest write. That’s only for me of course. Did you ever read short story of his called The Rattle of Wheels? It’s in the 2nd vol. of A Sportsman’s Sketches. War and Peace is the best book I know but imagine what a book it would have been if Turgenieff had written it. Chekov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer. Tolstoi was a prophet. Maupassant was a professional writer, Balzac was a professional writer, Turgenieff was an artist.”
Letter to Archibald MacLeish, 1925
Selected Letters, pg. 179

2328 A Sportsman's Notebook, by Ivan Turgenev translated from the Russian by Charles and Natasha Hepburn (read 27 Sep 1990) This is Turgenev's first published work, and made him famous. Czar Alexander Ii is said to have said it influenced him to free the serfs. It consists of 25 essays or sort of stories, telling of adventures a hunter had in Russia. It is hard to say I got a lot from these stories: they show the better class in Russia in no good light and the serfs are often as sensible as their supposed betters. Some of the descriptive writing is very evocative--one almost can feel oneself in the rural arras of Russian in the 1840's. ( )