The Hunting Sketches , Book 1 (My Neighbour Radilov and Other Stories…) by Ivan Turgenev


A work from a distant country in a foreign language written over a century-and-a-half ago had better be able to speak for itself. Fortunately, as an audio book, this one can.

When a book first comes out, as this one did, it attracts or repels readers largely on the basis of three things: its author, its topic, and its type or genre. While a swing and a miss on any of these is a strike against you, a hit on just one of them may save the day and keep the game alive. When Turgenev published The Hunting Sketches in 1852, he wasn’t well known (Strike One!). What’s more, though his material had a definite place to it (the estate he had just inherited from his domineering mother) and a gaggle of colorful people, it really had no theme or topic (Strike Two!!). When it came to the sole remaining chance, what Turgenev did actually doubled his difficulty ratio, because what he chose wasn’t the familiar and more popular story form, but that of the sketch (When was the last time you read, and thoroughly enjoyed, a sketch – on anything?). And here is exactly where Turgenev’s fortunes pivoted and turned around. Not only did he get his hit, but he knocked the ball into the stands, and – to stick with the sports metaphor – he even made it into the hall of fame.

The response was instantaneous. It wasn’t a matter of beginners luck, but emerged out of what he chose to focus his sketches on: character. Not as a mere literary device or technique employed to make a written piece more effective (though many regard it in this very way, and their work shows it), and few writers succeed, despite their many labored attempts, in learning to wield it in the engaging and life-like way Turgenev did. That is what shows so clearly in The Hunting Sketches, where again and again he seizes his people with both hands, determined not to let them go until they all “gave,” handing over the revealing riches character always holds within. He wrote of this exclusively, relentlessly, and unswervingly in every single sketch. What Turgenev found in character gave the people he wrote about -- the peasants and nobles of the provincial Russia of his day -- real things to talk about, think of, feel, say, and do. And that is found in his distinctly vivid characters.

Surely this boundless depth and dimensionality came as something of a surprise even to him. For what had he published up to that time but a long poem and a short story? But in 1847 at 29, he begins to write in the fine fashion found in The Hunting Sketches. It changed both the way he saw things and the way he would write from then on. It even had a hand in changing the world around him (several credit his writing with hastening the official end of serfdom as well).

That Turgenev could actually see the reality of character is evidence of his artistic creativity, but that he also chose to follow where it led is a sure sign of his own.