_The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of existence_, that is the secret of Turgenev's supremacy, and what a piercing instinct for the relative values of men's motives and actions is revealed by his calm, clear scrutiny! Observe in "The Agent" how the old serf Antip's weeping protest against his family's ruin at the hands of the tyrannous agent Sofron is made in _the model village_ Shiplova, with its tidy farm-buildings and new windmill and threshing-floors, its rich stacks and hemp-fields "all in excellent order." It is Sofron, the man of "first rate administrative power," so honey-tongued before the gentry, who farms four hundred acres of his own, and trades in horses and stock and corn and hemp, it is this petty despot in his prosperity who "is harrying the peasants out of their lives." "He is sharp, awfully sharp, and rich, too, the beast!" says the Ryabovo peasant. Behind the tyrannous bailiff Sofron is the owner of Shiplova, the polished Mr. Pyenotchkin, a retired officer of the Guards, who has mixed in the highest society. Mr. Pyenotchkin is a man _comme il faut_, but when he finds that his luckless footman has forgotten to warm the wine, he simply raises his eyebrows and orders his major-domo to "make the necessary arrangements"--to have Fyodor flogged! Here is progress on Western lines comfortably cheek by jowl with serfdom! Of course the sting, here, for the Russian conscience lay precisely in this juxtaposition of old and new, and in the knowledge that the most progressive landowner could exercise his legal right to sell his peasants, send a man away as a conscript, and separate him from his family. But it is well to note that only three or four of the _Sportsman's Sketches_ expose typical cases of a landlord's tyranny and the anachronism of this mediaeval survival--serfdom.
One of these cases is "Yermolai and the Miller's Wife," a sketch which for the calm breadth of vision in its exposure of serfdom is flawless. In "Yermolai" note how Turgenev by a series of discreet intermittent touches brings his people on the scene, and how the tranquil description of the winding river, the Ista, with its stony banks and cold clear streams and rugged precipitous banks, prepares us for the story of poor Arina's sorrows and of the self-complacent master's tyranny. Because Madame Zvyerkoff makes it a rule never to keep married lady's maids, poor Arina is disgraced, her lover sent away as a soldier, and she herself is married to the miller, who has offered a price for her. This distressing episode, though the central theme, is introduced subtly by a side wind after we have accompanied the narrator and the tall gaunt huntsman, Yermolai, to the Ista's banks, where the two sportsmen are benighted and seek sleep in the outhouse of a mill. The bull-necked, fat-bellied miller sends out his wife with a message to them, and this woman with her refined, mournful eyes is none other than the unfortunate Arina, with whom Yermolai is on old, familiar terms. The sportsman-narrator, who has been dozing in the hay, wakes and soon gathers from the snatches of talk between the pair the details of Arina's listless melancholy days after her child's death. Her bitter situation is flashed upon us in Yermolai's suggestion that she shall pay a visit to him in his hut when his own wife is away from home! She changes the subject and soon walks away, and Yermolai's peasant callousness is indicated in his yawning answer to his master's questions. Then this story of a woman's sorrow is brought to a close by one of those exquisite nature touches which brings us back again to the infinite life of the encompassing earth and sky: