A Sportsman's Sketches (; also known as A Sportman's Notebook, The Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album) is an 1852 cycle of short stories by Ivan Turgenev. It was the first major writing that gained him recognition.
This work is part of the Russian realist tradition in that the narrator is usually an uncommitted observer of the people he meets.
Writing and publication
Turgenev based many of these short stories on his own observations while hunting at his mother's estate at Spasskoye, where he learned of the abuse of the peasants and the injustices of the Russian system that constrained them. The frequent abuse of Turgenev by his mother certainly had an effect on this work.
The stories were first published singly in The Contemporary before appearing in 1852 in book form. Turgenev was about to give up writing when the first story, "Khor and Kalinich", was well received. The work as a whole actually led to Turgenev's house arrest (part of the reason, the other being his epitaph to Nikolai Gogol) at Spasskoye.
The stories
Khor and Kalinych
Story of two peasants one who is extremely thrifty, and the other an idealist, both of whom work for a petty landowner named Polutykin. This introduces the role of the narrator as the uncommitted observer. Turgenev at once appears as a writer and an artist but also a social reformer and activist. The separation of the two peasants plays a big role in later works by the author, as he explained in a speech given in 1860 where he talks about the dichotomy of his "Hamlet-like" and "Quixotic" characters. The main idea here though is displaying the intelligence of the peasants and the idiocy of their master. It is also perhaps one of his strongest arguments in favor of Westernization in Russia.
Yermolay and the Miller’s Wife
Story of the narrator's hunter friend and a night they spend at a miller's home. This is the first sketch he appears in. The man, Zverkov, gives the reader a clear idea of the injustices of serfdom, this being the main idea of this particular story.
Raspberry Water
Story of the narrator meeting and talking to two peasants at a little spring called Raspberry Water (which did exist and still exists in Russia). Here the narrator is very distant, akin to early Realist narrators, and learns of the self-deprivation peasants take upon themselves through the recollections of the old peasant named Foggy.
District Doctor
Struck with fever in a small village, the narrator is visited by a district doctor who tells him a story of how he fell in love with a dying girl. It is told from his perspective rather than the narrator's.
My Neighbor Radilov
Yermolay is with the narrator again. The story consists of them meeting a landowner named Radilov. They have dinner at his house and learn he is not a typical landowner and shows goodwill (he's not gloomy about his fate either). He mentions when his wife died and how he didn't really shed a tear until he saw a fly crawl over her eye. Radilov disappears at the end and the family he lived with does not know where he went.
Farmer Ovsyanikov
Poor landowner the narrator meets, who Turgenev uses to talk about the social ills of serfdom while avoiding the censors. He does nothing more than sit and talk.
Lgov
Yermolay and the narrator go hunting and meet up with Old Knot, an old peasant who is the local fisherman and has held several ridiculous positions in the area. This story is particularly noteworthy for its vivid character descriptions. The group goes hunting in the lake with a pretentious hunter named Vladimir, sink the boat and then wade to shore filthy after great difficulty.
Bezhin Lea
The narrator gets lost in the woods and comes across a clearing, where he meets up with five peasant boys near a fire who are guarding the horses. The narrator pretends to be asleep and the boys forget he is there and start talking about fairies and talking animals, stories that they believe to be true. The beauty of the story is typically found in the innocence of the young boys. Serfdom here is hidden in the background, never truly mentioned or argued against as in the other stories.