Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)
Записки охотника (A Sportsman’s Notebook) (1852, expanded 1874)

The roll was 969 = Ivan Turgenev. First work below his name is 970 = A Sportsman’s Notebook, translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn. I purchased (from The Strand) and read this very translation. See above. The Everyman’s Library edition is a pleasure to hold in the hand.

Unconnected short stories of Russian peasants and landowners. “Sportsman” here means hunter.

One point of reference that occurred to me is Dubliners, from 60-odd years later. Both are portraits of the quotidian that zoom inward until some tiny detail seems to reveal a hidden kind of significance. Joyce very much had allegorical meanings in mind, and the idea that the everyday could serve as an allegory for the profound was absolutely part of the project; Turgenev I don’t think had any specific notion of meaning in mind. What they have in common is that they sketch whole scenes, characters, courses of events, painting in broad strokes, then finer and finer, until, at the pivotal moment, they just breathe very lightly on the canvas, and it’s as though the whole structure has just been to give us sufficient context for this breath to register. In Joyce these “breaths,” the tiny non-epiphanic epiphanies, have fairly clear moral content. In Turgenev they sometimes “wrap things up” in a clear enough way, or blatantly surprise us, but to actually pick them apart and understand them is more difficult because the stories do not contain any clear moral content at all. The subject of the stories is the experience itself. Smells, colors in the sky, breezes are given genuinely equal weight to the characters and dialogue – and the infinitesimal point of drama to which each story progresses ends up seeming to embody, in some mysterious way, the crucial essence of that experience. This is the effect of the form, and of his control with language, but it captures something real about life: the way – described by Proust many times over – that some certain detail of an experience can arbitrarily become, to an individual, the linchpin detail in the memory of that experience.

Another point of reference for me, and this is deeply stupid but god bless the internet for giving it a home, was text adventure games of the Infocom variety. In those games, an eerie sense of actual locality builds up around the reader/player, just from the sheer emphasis on descriptions of surroundings – an emphasis not found in many other kinds of writing. Turgenev’s calm, descriptive voice placing trees, waving grass, shifting clouds, dirt roads, sheds, shadows, etc. etc. etc. all around me was infinitely more artful and refined than the one that told me I was “in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed” but had a similar effect of drawing me into a world of actual space that was, like Adventure, strangely quiet – almost more meditative than the actual outdoors. The characters in the stories sometimes seem palpably distant, seen only through the scrim of the narrator’s reflection on them, despite the fact that this reflection is completely unstated. We feel his presence because we know he’s the one smelling the air and noticing all those clouds. In one of the stories – probably my favorite one, “Bezhin Meadow,” the narrator gets lost walking home through dark fields, and the sense of physical, sensory situation, and of lostness, is very strong. This is a particular and peculiar sort of talent for an author to have.

I went to the right, through brushwood. Meanwhile night approached and grew on me like a storm-cloud; it was as if darkness was welling up from the ground on all sides, with the mists of evening, and streaming down from above at the same time. I fell in with a rough, overgrown path, and went along it, keeping a sharp look-out ahead. Soon it was all dark and still around me–there was only the call of quails from time to time. A small night-bird, flying low on soft and soundless wings, almost knocked into me and shied off to one side. I came to the end of the brushwood and continued along the edge of a field. It was already difficult to distinguish distant objects; the field made a white blur around me; beyond it was a gloomy, towering mass of darkness which looked nearer every moment. My footfalls sounded muffled in the stagnant air. The sky, which had become drained of colour, began to grow blue again–but, this time, with the blue of night. Against it, little stars were stirring and twinkling.

What I had taken for a wood turned out to be a dark, round hillock. “Then where on earth am I?” I repeated again…

The passage is much longer than that and it all accumulates wonderfully up to that point and beyond it. And then, only after this has all built up, we are introduced to the characters of this story, and after that to the “theme,” and then only at the very very end, to the dramatic throwaway that either is or isn’t the point of the whole thing. I know this kind of concentric spiral construction was common in 19th-century literature, but generally I’m used to such things leading to a big shocker that in retrospect makes clear how the buildup was meant to function. In these stories, though, the would-be payoff only lends value to what preceded it, rather than drawing value to itself. I said that already.

Another angle on the same: It is rare in literature that one reads about things described for their own sake. Here the scenery is not particularly the scenery for some action; it is simply scenery “in-itself,” to be experienced directly, perhaps in combination with other meanings and events but not mediated through them.

Another author for whom the scenery is the message: Tolkien.

These stories were beautiful and their quietude seemed philosophically durable; they did not feel at all antiquated, even though they’re entirely concerned with the details of a lost time and place. I very much enjoyed the book.

Here’s a food-for-thought postscript. I recommended the book to my grandmother, who was inspired to do a search for Turgenev, and quickly came across a somewhat obscure early story, “The Jew” (1846). The stock character of the slimy hateful Jew goes with the territory of 19th-century Russian literature, but this story is strikingly noxious. (My grandmother notes that the Russian title itself, Жид, is in fact a slur – some translations give it as “The Yid.”) For my grandmother, that was it for Turgenev. I personally feel torn.

My initial reaction was honest surprise, because there is in fact a Jew in one of the stories in A Sportsman’s Notebook, portrayed in the same even, potentially sympathetic light as nearly everyone else in the book. From a certain point of view, the story is actually a sort of satire on the meaningless and undeserved prejudices that burden the Russian protagonist’s dealings with him. It may be worth noting that this is one of the two stories added 20 years after first publication. But there’s no denying that this early story, “The Jew,” is morally indefensible; it savors in the repugnance of the Jew’s amorality and the horrible pathos of his whining as he is executed.* And, most damning of all, that’s the entirety of the story; there’s nothing else in there giving it purpose.

This brings us to the old Wagner question – does it matter to us what terrible things the artist believed? In Turgenev’s case, what if he didn’t believe them his whole life? Or what if we can’t be sure what he really believed? A Sportsman’s Notebook is not in any way itself an anti-Semitic book; how relevant then is the issue? I generally don’t like the kind of thinking that holds grudges against inanimate objects; or, rather, boycotts against dead entities that cannot feel the sting of the boycott and will never learn their lesson. Outlawing “Tristan und Isolde” in Israel implicitly lends legitimacy to some of Wagner’s most hateful thinking: that anti-Semitism is the core of a rich philosophical vein, a whole aesthetic way of being, and that it can produce great art. “Tristan” doesn’t really have anything to do with Jews and is quite beautiful – holding it in contempt as “aesthetically anti-Semitic” is being awfully generous to anti-Semitism. Of course, the situation is more complicated – Wagner’s present-day admirers are the actual intended recipients of the boycott’s sting, and perhaps that’s not so unreasonable.

So as for Turgenev, “The Jew” I deem absolutely indefensible; A Sportsman’s Notebook I highly recommend, and in general that wouldn’t seem to me hypocritical. But in this case, discovering “The Jew” did in fact give me pause, and I still don’t know how to reconcile my feelings on the question.

The capacity for grotesque bigotry indicates an insensitivity to seeing the world accurately. These stories I so admired were all about the gentle, introspective observance of life. I read them in sympathy because I felt that the narrator was truly open – as open as I can be, at least – to things revealing themselves as they are. Prejudice is the very opposite of being open to things revealing themselves as they are, and learning that the quietly observing person at the center of these stories was capable of sneering racial contempt is not just a historical incidental; it is at direct odds with my reading of the stories. Their philosophy was opposed to it. Maybe this is a case of the reader projecting his own beliefs into a void, a blank self. Or maybe Turgenev was being insincere in one place or the other, or both. I don’t have an explanation for it. But it has indeed tarnished my reading. I note that the question of Turgenev’s ambiguous thoughts on Jews has been written up in several scholarly articles that I find online. I can understand why.

I give the book a strong aesthetic recommendation draped precariously over a moral question mark.

One more down. Four more to go before I’m caught up with myself.

* Actually, the tone of the story becomes peculiar toward the end, as though Turgenev is striving for something rich and humane, all within the context of this horrendous caricature. Maybe there is even some kind of twisted attempt at sympathy in there. All the worse, in a way. But there’s certainly room for debate about what particular effect he was going for. That’s not to say there’s room for debate about whether the story is founded on a hateful stereotype. Boy howdy is it ever.