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Christian Tyler on Ivan Turgenev, Slightly Foxed Issue 7

Waist-high in Kale

Tsar Alexander II was warned that Turgenev’s collection of short stories, variously translated into English as Sketches from a Hunter’s Album or A Sportsman’s Notebook, was politically subversive. He read it, nonetheless, and later said it had influenced his decision in 1861 to liberate Russia’s 40 million serfs.

Turgenev’s role as a social reformer is now just an historical footnote. What survives is an extraordinary set of portraits placed in the vividly described landscape of Orel province where he grew up. Posterity should be grateful that he chose to use pen and ink, not soapbox and megaphone, to make his case. He did not even have to argue: he simply wrote down what he heard and saw.

And so today we can still meet the serf Styopushka who is compelled to scavenge for food like an animal, and is encountered on the river bank fixing maggots to the hook of a fellow serf; and the pitiable Lukeria, a beautiful parlour-maid who, though not yet 30, has been reduced to a skeleton by an unidentified illness and lives uncomplainingly in a shed. Then there is Suchok, the ‘master fisherman’, who, when asked why his boat is so leaky, replies ‘because there are no fish in our river’ and who stands shyly before the narrator ‘with head hanging and his hands folded behind his back in the traditional attitude’.

Turgenev was not only a portraitist; he was also a landscape artist. Like Thomas Hardy he was driven to the summit of eloquence by the violence of nature and the beauty of the countryside. I like particularly the summer night in which the narrator gets lost (‘Bezhin Lea’), the moonlit drive to Tula (‘Clatter

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Tsar Alexander II was warned that Turgenev’s collection of short stories, variously translated into English as Sketches from a Hunter’s Album or A Sportsman’s Notebook, was politically subversive. He read it, nonetheless, and later said it had influenced his decision in 1861 to liberate Russia’s 40 million serfs.

Turgenev’s role as a social reformer is now just an historical footnote. What survives is an extraordinary set of portraits placed in the vividly described landscape of Orel province where he grew up. Posterity should be grateful that he chose to use pen and ink, not soapbox and megaphone, to make his case. He did not even have to argue: he simply wrote down what he heard and saw. And so today we can still meet the serf Styopushka who is compelled to scavenge for food like an animal, and is encountered on the river bank fixing maggots to the hook of a fellow serf; and the pitiable Lukeria, a beautiful parlour-maid who, though not yet 30, has been reduced to a skeleton by an unidentified illness and lives uncomplainingly in a shed. Then there is Suchok, the ‘master fisherman’, who, when asked why his boat is so leaky, replies ‘because there are no fish in our river’ and who stands shyly before the narrator ‘with head hanging and his hands folded behind his back in the traditional attitude’. Turgenev was not only a portraitist; he was also a landscape artist. Like Thomas Hardy he was driven to the summit of eloquence by the violence of nature and the beauty of the countryside. I like particularly the summer night in which the narrator gets lost (‘Bezhin Lea’), the moonlit drive to Tula (‘Clatter of Wheels’), and the long hymn to the seasons in ‘Forest and Steppe’ which includes this picture of an autumn day
when the birch all golden like a tree in a fairy-story stands out delicately against the pale-blue sky; when the low sun has no more warmth in it, but shines out clearer than in summer; when the small poplar-wood sparkles from end to end, as if the trees found relief and exhilaration in standing naked; when there is still the whiteness of hoar-frost in the bottom of the valleys and a cool breeze is stirring faintly and blowing the fallen crumpled leaves; when on the river the blue waves rush joyfully past, gently rocking the geese and duck that float dreamily on them. From the distance comes the hammer of a watermill, half-hidden among the willows, and above it pigeons wheel swiftly, their colours shifting and changing in the brilliant air.
Remarkably, these scenes were described while Turgenev was living nearly two thousand miles away, outside Paris, in the home of the opera singer Pauline Viardot (with whom he was in love) and her husband. If they were done entirely from memory, then truly he had a painter’s gift of recall for the shapes of clouds, the colours of dawn and the pattern of rain falling through trees. The secret of Turgenev’s astonishing descriptive power lies in the way he acquired these memories. It is plain from the stories that the writer, like his narrator, was a sportsman. That is to say, he would walk out in all weathers and in all seasons with a gun and a dog (an English dog, by his account) to shoot game birds – mainly partridge, quail, snipe and woodcock. Sometimes he went alone. Usually he was accompanied by a serf: most often by a man called Afanasy Alifanov who was owned by a neighbour. Alifanov appears in the stories as ‘Yermolai’, and Turgenev later purchased his freedom. In Russia, sportsmen were free to shoot over anybody’s land. At the end of a long day it was normal for the gentry to beg food and drink from the serfs, and to spend the night on a bundle of straw in a barn. No wonder, then, that Turgenev carried with him to Paris such vivid memories of the people and landscape of his native province. His power of nostalgic recall was what struck me most when I came across the Sketches only a few years ago – the more so, since I had just moved back to the countryside after 35 years living and working in the city and was having to reacquaint myself with skies and storms, seasons, sunsets and dawns, things which as a child I had taken for granted. Turgenev’s nostalgia for Russia revived my own for Scotland where, from about the age of 14, I went out every summer holiday with the local gamekeeper – the most taciturn man I have ever met – to walk the hills with a shotgun. We would cover five or six miles a day, shooting rabbits flushed from their burrows by a ferret; plod through sodden, waist-high kale in the hope of putting up a covey of partridge. At harvest time we put out decoys for pigeons on the corn stooks in the field above the firth; at dusk we would wait at the river pools for duck. Occasionally we would find snipe, and, in the deepest woods, blackcock or even a lumbering capercaillie. I had expected age and city life to have eroded my enthusiasm for shooting. Yet when I returned to the countryside a few years ago, I found myself taking down my gun once more. Things had changed a lot. When society was still divided into classes, shooting was considered a normal occupation for anybody who lived on the land (though of course the rich got the best shooting). Today, in our emancipated society, shooting is seen as a crime – or at least a perversion committed by the wealthy. I read that a cancer research charity recently turned down £30,000 from a man who had raised the money by beating for shoots for a record 148 days in one season. The reforming zeal that once was devoted to liberating people has been diverted into liberating animals. Turgenev put people before birds; animal rights zealots put birds before people. To be fair, there were a few complaints even in Turgenev’s day. One of his characters is the religious eccentric Kasyan, who objects when the narrator shoots a corncrake. The narrator says: ‘He’s game and you can eat him.’ ‘That’s not why you killed him, master, as if you were going to eat him! You killed him for your sport,’ replies Kasyan. ‘But I’ll warrant that you yourself eat goose, or chicken, for example.’ Kasyan invokes the Bible: ‘Those are fowls set apart by God for man; but a corncrake is a free fowl. And he is not the only one; there are many of them . . . that it’s a sin to kill; you should let them live their allotted span on earth. Other food is reserved for man.’ Actually, the Book of Genesis is a bit ambiguous on this. ‘Let [man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth,’ it says. But a few verses later: ‘I have given you every herb-bearing seed . . . and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat,’ which implies a vegetarian diet. Of course, not all shooting is sporting. But then not all sport is sporting – think of professional fouls in football. In any age, hunting can degenerate into self-indulgence. The Persian nobleman in ancient times would have wild animals penned into an enclosure for him and his friends to kill. The modern equivalent is the Texas rancher who – so I read some years ago – corralled moth-eaten circus animals on his land and charged ‘hunters’ for the privilege of bagging them. Some of the big commercial pheasant shoots today come uncomfortably close to this system of pay-as-you-go, where the poorest shot is guaranteed his bag. The day is fast approaching when sportsmen, however rich, will have to justify their recreation to the public. For myself, I cannot see how shooting a bird can be wrong, provided it is cleanly done and the bird has a sporting chance. But I realize that the argument – as in the case of foxhunting – cannot be settled by reason. It is a question of what you are used to. Few city dwellers can understand how anyone gets pleasure from shooting birds, just as they cannot understand how anyone can enjoy chasing a fox to death on horseback. All they see is the killing. At the same time, hunters and shooters are not very good at explaining their enjoyment – that complicated bundle of sensations and feelings, aesthetic, kinaesthetic and emotional – that Turgenev describes so well. If you have never seen a snipe zigzag away from you as you struggle through a bog, or a woodcock flit like a ghost through the trees, its wings at right angles to the earth, you will not understand. If you have not felt the gripe of anticipation as you stalk a hedgerow or stand poised at the edge of a wood, or the satisfaction of bringing down a high pheasant racing downwind, or the frustration of an offday, or the glow that keeps tired limbs moving at the end of a good one, then you will not understand why shooting is called a sport. But there is one way of tasting these pleasures and pains, without shedding a drop of avian blood: you can read Turgenev’s Sketches.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Christian Tyler 2005


About the contributor

Christian Tyler chose rustication four years ago in order to write books. He enjoys rough shooting and is keenly looking forward to the season.

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