the suggested utopia of the natural world

on Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album

This year, and especially since the summer, I have found myself — once again — falling into the trap of Russian literature. It is a very lovely, cozy trap, one I don’t mind being in, largely because nineteenth century Russian authors love to vacillate between cynicism, optimism, and idealism in a way that feels familiar to me.

Most recently, I enjoyed Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, published in its original Russian in 1852 and translated to English by Richard Freeborn in 1967. My edition was published in 1975 and was found in a small used bookstore in Barcelona in mid-October. It contained a business card for a Minneapolis restaurant called Table of Contents that seemingly — and sadly, because what a name — closed its doors in 2001.

You might already know this about me, but I love a short story collection. Sketches gained even more spine creases as it traveled with me from the fourth to the thirtieth of November and anchored my reading throughout the month (in my experience it is much easier, when reading stories, to juggle multiple books at a time). Stories travel well, often better than novels.

Hunting was solely the nominal premise on which Turgenev’s stories were hinged. What the author was actually interested in was nature and its intrinsic connection to peasant life, which Turgenev’s narrator is able to access by taking on the role of hunter and thus (presumably) divesting himself of the trappings of landownership. Trappings that, we are reminded, he is able to pick back up at any point.

This is what made Sketches so compelling to me: like Turgenev, our unnamed narrator explicitly belongs to the landed gentry but somehow sees himself as keen observer of both his own and the peasant classes, believing to possess sufficient distance from both groups to make him a relatively objective witness. The tool that we are to understand gives him this distance, or perhaps this ability to almost belong to both groups simultaneously, is his penchant for hunting, for losing himself to more earthly pursuits.

To abandon the comforts of his family’s estate (itself, it is implied, worked by serfs) to seek the pleasures of hunting leaves him subject to the laws of nature and dependent on the kindness of people with whom he would not otherwise interact closely: peasants.

Writing in 2022 about a new translation of Fathers and Sons, Keith Gessen says about Sketches that “[w]ithout ever saying so outright, Turgenev makes it plain that most of the masters are self-satisfied and ignorant brutes, while the serfs are ordinary people trying to go about the business of life.” I agree — Turgenev is never explicitly critical of his fellow landowners, and instead takes on the role of agnostic observer, believing his proximity to peasants’ woeful circumstances to be sufficient. It’s a role I found gripping, if a little disappointing.

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From the first story, “Khor and Kalinych,” we are introduced to Turgenev’s fondness for fellow hunters (“Where out hunting in the Zhizdra region I became acquainted with a small Kaluga landowner, Polutykin, also a passionate hunter and, consequently, an excellent fellow”) and his interest in what we’ll call the Peasant Condition, one he is able to observe so intimately because of his dedication to hunting. He describes the peasant Khor’s hut with a level of detail that is only occasionally granted to his fellow landowners’ home (“No cheap pictures … were stuck on the clean, beamed walls … The table … had recently been scrubbed and wiped clean … and among the beams and the window-frames there were neither scurrying cockroaches nor lurking, contemplative beetles”), simultaneously revealing the narrator’s preconceptions of how a peasant’s home should look. To Turgenev, Khor is immediately of more interest than the landowner Polutykin, who is abandoned to the background as soon as we meet Khor. The narrator is impressed upon learning that “[o]wing to the peculiar nature of his social station, his virtual independence, Khor mentioned many things in talking … that even a crow-bar wouldn’t have dislodged in someone else or, as the peasants say, you couldn’t grind out with a millstone.” The preconceptions strike early and often.

Khor is not the only object of our narrator’s admiration. Throughout the Sketches, Turgenev appears thrilled to encounter serfs who are able to outsmart their circumstances and, especially, their masters. This is in sharp contrast to characters he depicts as taking advantage of their fellow serfs, characters for whom Turgenev reserves the harshest of words. Of Safron, the peasant who in “Bailiff” runs the landowner Arkady Pavlych’s estate and keeps many of the estate’s serfs in crippling debt, our hunter listens to one such grieving serf say: “Clever, awful clever, he is, and rich, too, the varmint! What’s bad about him is – he’s always knocking someone about. A wild beast, not a man.”

Interestingly, Turgenev rarely describes his fellow landowners with such direct venom, choosing instead to let his readers arrive at their own conclusions while describing the landed gentry as bumbling, pompous fools who cannot help their attitude or behavior (the landowner for whom Sofran works, for instance, “speaks in a soft and pleasant voice, lending his speech due measure and deriving enjoyment, as it were, from permitting each word to pass through his splendid, perfumed whiskers”). Strongly implied, yes, that the true adversary is the system that allows a figure such as Sofran to flourish, and our narrator regularly demonstrates his contempt for Arkady Pavlych et al (“I at least visit him with the utmost reluctance”), but as far as individual vileness is concerned, Turgenev appears more directly critical of those who betray their own (working) class than of those who systemically benefit from the institution of serfdom. It is not the individualism that seems to most bother Turgenev, but the lack of solidarity.

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As regards his own class, it is not solidarity that the author feels. Turgenev reveals, time and time again, that despite sharing their company and status, his narrator is not exceedingly happy or even comfortable among the landed gentry. Our hunter is invited, in “Hamlet of the Schigrovsky District,” to “dine with a wealthy landowner and hunter;” as soon as he arrives, he tells us that “[a]lmost all the guests were complete strangers to [him].” And although yes, this line serves a practical purpose — these party guests are not familiar to him —, one cannot help but compare and realize that the element of strangeness (to him) is never one Turgenev expresses about any of the peasants with whom the narrator interacts. Is that because he feels a sense of belonging among the peasants and their huts, or one of benign superiority? I would argue it is the latter, which is why Sketches’ theme of anthropological proximity to the peasant class sometimes rings a bit false.

Turgenev explores the notion that as someone who often finds himself in nature and indeed seems to be more at ease therein than at his or fellow landowners’ estates (in none of the Sketches do we find ourselves in the hunter’s home, nor does he reminisce about his home), he can examine the Peasant Condition more perceptively than his fellow landowners, bridging the distance between the classes by situating himself closer to huts than to estates. We are led to believe that the natural world serves a democratizing function, in a way collapsing the stratification of Russian society into the very base of Maslow’s pyramid for all parties involved. Upon a closer read, however, we can see that this democratization only goes one way.

Despite his higher social status and means, it is the hunter who repeatedly finds himself in situations wherein he is dependent on — and receiving of — the peasants’ help for food, shelter, and warmth. These, unlike the Peasant Condition, are temporary problems that Turgenev’s narrator has created for himself (no one forced him to go hunting), but because they are basic needs, they take on more urgency than the peasants’ inability to gain freedom and the means of ownership over the land they work. The former is immediately addressed while the latter, to its detriment, becomes a long-term philosophical question.

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In “Bezhin Lea,” finding himself too far from home past nightfall in the middle of the forest (I cannot emphasize enough how poorly Turgenev seems to have planned his hunting trips), the narrator becomes “at last convinced that [he] had completely lost [his] way and, no longer making any effort to recognize [his] surroundings … [he] walked straight ahead … following the stars and hoping for the best.” The “best” ends up being the discovery of twin fires being stoked by a group of peasants, at which point the hunter’s anxiety is almost entirely dissipated. There is little question of being welcomed by the peasant boys (“I told the boys that I had lost my way and sat down among them. They asked me where I was from and fell silent for a while in awe of me.”), and although we could chalk this up to their spiritual largesse, it is much easier to imagine that due to the stark difference in status, the peasants find it difficult (if not impossible) to deny a landowner.

In “The Reformer and the Russian German,” Turgenev’s narrator is caught in the rain for the umpteenth time, but “[h]appily, a village could be seen not far off” and eventually the “driver turned towards the gates of the nearest hut and shouted for the hut’s owner,” who lets our narrator and his driver in and feeds them. During this time, the peasant in question complains to our narrator about his master, who has “worked [them] to the bone.” The conversation takes on a confessional quality, wherein the hunter plays the role of sympathetic listener whose only job is to pay attention and lend an ear. Not an unimportant role, but certainly a self-contained one.

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Initially, I was very much of the mind that Turgenev’s portrayal of society through the lens of nature and hunting was optimistic, similarly to how hiking always refreshes my hope in people: a depiction of a world in which an appreciation for nature prevails over an obsession with materialism and ownership. The more I kept mulling it over, though, the more I began thinking of it as a highly idealized and romantic perspective that doesn’t in actuality ring particularly true. I was asking too much from the narrative.

Nature is the most common setting for Sketches, so it is easy to forget that for Turgenev’s narrator, it is but a temporary respite from his life, which is presumably lived on land that serfs will work for but never be able to possess. He is a visitor in peasants’ routines and daily lives; at the same time, we are reminded that he does not enjoy the company of fellow landowners and blames them for serfs’ continued suffering, but he keeps going to their homes and engaging in polite interactions. The whiplash is heavy, in no small part because it feels so akin to current modes of political discourse within the “elite.”

And so, on the subject of nature as a democratizing force: one can only arrive at the conclusion that love of nature can bring the landowning hunter closer to observing the Peasant Condition, but observation and momentary proximity alone can only go so far in overcoming the systemic differences between the livelihoods of serfs and landowners.

I tried to imagine a role reversal, wherein an unknown serf might be lost in the woods and require our hunter’s help — would he receive it?

The only time Turgenev hints at such a possibility is in “Living Relic,” wherein — again seeking refuge from the rain — he discovers a peasant woman, Lukeria, lying still as a “mummy” in a shed due to vague and long-suffering injuries. Her state is described as “completely withered” but “far from ugly” (goals, if you will). The narrator is outraged by her situation, especially because she is a serf he knew previously and “after whom [he] used to sigh in secret.” He offers for Lukeria “to be taken to a … good town hospital” so that she can be treated, but she adamantly refuses and indeed, begs him to leave her alone lest doctors exacerbate her pain.

Lukeria then says something that, upon re-reading, made me recoil a bit: “But, master, my dear one, who is there that can help another person? Who can enter into another’s soul? People must help themselves!” Perhaps this is a cynical reading on my end, but her words read to me as an insight into Turgenev’s own feelings on the matter, wherein he saw his powers of observation and subsequent storytelling — and powers they are — as an end, and not a means.

To be fair, Turgenev was opposed to serfdom, and Sketches was considered influential in shifting public opinion toward the institution’s abolition. Still, one cannot help but feel a sense of agnostic detachment from the author, one that types the last word of a story and declares that he’s done his part.

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Turgenev wants us to know that He Is Not Like Them. And that may be true. The idea that one’s presence in and observation of the natural world can bridge the distance between classes is a very pretty one, but much like Turgenev’s hunting trips, the bridge is temporary.

“Forest and Steppe,” the last full story in Sketches, is almost fully devoid of human interaction. The only instance occurs when our hunter asks a passing peasant where he can find water. The peasant answers (of course), and the narrator goes on to enjoy the purity that can be found in solitude within nature. It is a beautiful story, bucolic and written in an almost hypnotic second person narrative. The author’s appreciation and love for the natural world in “Forest and Steppe” is so evident it suggests he may have written the rest of the stories just for the pleasure of arriving at this one. He did his homework, regaled us with stories of beleaguered peasants, and as a reward on a job well done, he releases himself into the utopia of a hunter’s forest.

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