A Sportsman's Sketches

Front Cover
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Jul 26, 2016 - Fiction - 148 pages
The first work by Ivan Turgenev to attain wide attention, A Sportsman's Sketches is a collection of short stories mostly set amid Russia's rural population of serfs and peasants.

Written by Turgenev in response to the stark poverty and injustices he witnessed in Russia, the stories here depict various encounters with peasants, while the narrator himself remains unseen. Each different tale illustrates a different injustice, with characters often ordinary peasants scraping a living off the land. Others, such as the dwarf Kasyan, combine a love of folklore with a distaste for the society they live and work within.

Some peasants are kindly and popular, while others are thrifty and wise - in spite of their shared circumstances, Turgenev paints a picture of a countryside which contained both arable beauty and social neglect. Although some of Turgenev's stories are short anecdotes which state a simple point before concluding, others colourfully expound upon their subjects and environment.

The author himself also underwent personal abuse on the part of his mother - far from breaking the writer's spirit, this early oppression steeled Turgenev against wrongdoing. Much of his authoring career was spent vilifying the abysmal standard of living the Russian serfs endured under Tsarist rule. The publication of A Sportsman's Sketches resulted in jail time for the author, but also contributed to the outlawing of serfdom in Russia.

Other editions - View all

About the author (2016)

Ivan Turgenev, 1818 - 1883 Novelist, poet and playwright, Ivan Turgenev, was born to a wealthy family in Oryol in the Ukraine region of Russia. He attended St. Petersburg University (1834-37) and Berlin University (1838-41), completing his master's exam at St. Petersburg. His career at the Russian Civil Service began in 1841. He worded for the Ministry of Interior from 1843-1845. In the 1840's, Turgenev began writing poetry, criticism, and short stories under Nikolay Gogol's influence. "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852) were short pieces written from the point of view of a nobleman who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants who live on his family's estate. This brought him a month of detention and eighteen months of house arrest. From 1853-62, he wrote stories and novellas, which include the titles "Rudin" (1856), "Dvorianskoe Gnedo" (1859), "Nakanune" (1860) and "Ottsy I Deti" (1862). Turgenev left Russia, in 1856, because of the hostile reaction to his work titled "Fathers and Sons" (1862). Turgenev finally settled in Paris. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1860 and Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University in 1879. His last published work, "Poems in Prose," was a collection of meditations and anecdotes. On September 3, 1883, Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris.

Bibliographic information