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Ideology in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter: The First Three Sketches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Victor Ripp
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Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1852) is considered by most critics—even by those who condemn his subsequent politics, judging them a mixture of vacuous pronouncements and ineffectual gestures—a genuine liberal statement. Literary critics who do not go so far as to claim that the work contributed directly to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1861—a view Turgenev himself occasionally espoused—at least assert that Notes of a Hunter is as biting and affecting a criticism of serfdom as literature could level at the time. There is, I believe, a serious objection to this position. I am not referring to the argument that a cycle of twenty-two sketches mainly about a man out hunting with his dog can hardly have much to do with politics; there are so many references to social injustice that even the narrator's most seemingly mundane observations, such as his disquisitions on various hunting techniques, must be read as willful efforts to distract himself from the corruption of Russian life.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1979

References

1. Turgenev's belief in the crucial role that Notes of a Hunter played in the emancipation of the serfs was recorded by his good friends Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their Journal, memoires de la vie litteraire, vol. 10 (Monaco, 1956): 75. The single most exhaustive treatment of Notes of a Hunter, focusing on both the text and the historical circumstances surrounding it, is Shatalov, S. E., Zapiski okhotnika I. S. Turgeneva (Stalinabad, 1960).Google Scholar

2. Leonid Grossman's claim that serfdom serves only a stylistic, “compositional” function in Notes of a Hunter has had great influence (see his “Rannii zhanr Turgeneva,” in Grossman, Leonid P., Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. [Moscow, 1928], 3: 38–68)Google Scholar. Grossman's essay is part of a widespread critical tendency to dismiss Turgenev's political concerns altogether, and, in fact, there is much in Turgenev's works and in Turgenev's own statements that supports such an interpretation; but there is at least an equal amount of evidence to support a contrary view as well. My own position, developed in this paper, is that, to the extent that Turgenev discounted politics, it was as a consequence of what he learned in practicing his very politically aware literary method. The internal dynamic of his work taught him the limits of political possibilities in the Russia of his time: literature is a powerfully efficacious mode of knowledge, and what one learns through literature cannot be ignored by shifting over to a purportedly more real or commonsensical view of things.

3. The argument that a literary work progressively reveals and also adjusts its meaning has been made most persuasively by Stanley, Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley and London, 1972)Google Scholar, to whom I am indebted. My own procedure, however, follows Fish only in the very broadest terms of his argument.

4. The publishing history of Notes of a Hunter is complicated. Turgenev began writing the sketches almost offhand, when he was considering giving up literature altogether, and largely as a favor to several friends who had recently taken over the editorship of Sovretnennik. At the outset, Turgenev had no intention of writing a cycle. The 1852 collection was therefore the first opportunity for him to impose some sense of what the sketches taken as a whole meant to him. He made several changes in the ordering of the sketches. He also had to make alterations in the text to placate the censors, who scrutinized books more carefully than journals. The whole story is set forth in an appendix to Turgenev's collected works (I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols. [Moscow-Leningrad, 1961-68], 4: 494-521. Volumes 1-15 contain Turgenev's literary works [sochineniia], the last thirteen volumes, numbered 1-13, contain his letters [pis'ma]; all subsequent references to Turgenev are to this edition, hereafter cited as Sochineniia or Pis'ma).

5. Turgenev, Sochineniia, 4: 7.

6. Serfdom obligated peasants either to perform labor on demesne land (barshchina) or to pay rent to the landlord for their own land allotment (obrok). Of the two alternatives, the second was generally preferred since landlords usually required so much labor that the peasants had no time to tend to their own crops.

7. The most comprehensive study of Turgenev's relationship to the Westernizer movement remains Henri, Granjard, Ivan Tourguenev et les entrants politiques et sociaux de son temps (Paris, 1954).Google Scholar

8. Konstantin, Kavelin, “Vzgliad na iuridicheskii byt drevnei Rossii,” Sovremennik, 1847, no. 1, section 2, p. 49.Google Scholar

9. Turgenev, Sochineniia, 4: 14-15.

10. For an account of the physiological sketch in Russia, its historical development, and the philosophical assumptions underlying it, see Tseitlin, A. G., Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature (Moscow, 1965).Google Scholar Peter, Demetz, “Balzac and the Zoologists: A Concept of the Type,” in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Demetz, Peter (New Haven, 1968), pp. 398–418 Google Scholar, provides an excellent discussion of some of the conceptual difficulties surrounding this literary genre. Demetz's focus is on French literature, but his comments are relevant to the situation in Russia.

11. Turgenev, Pis'ma, 2: 77.

12. Valerian, Maikov, Kriticheskie opyty (St. Petersburg, 1891), p. 5.Google Scholar

13. On Teniers's influence, see Grossman, “Rannii zhanr Turgeneva,” p. 49.

14. Turgenev, Pis'ma, 1: 292.

15. Turgenev, Sochinemia, 5: 390.

16. Ibid., 4: 282.

17. Quoted in Andrzej, Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Rusiecka, Hilda Andrews (Oxford, 1975), p. 362.Google Scholar This book offers an excellent discussion of the debate between the Slavophiles and Westernizers, and I am indebted to its author.

18. Turgenev, Sochineniia, 5: 415.

19. Ibid., 4: 21.

20. Ibid., p. 32.

21. Ibid., p. 35. H 22. Ibid., p. 38.

23. Some recent historians have argued that contemporaries regularly overestimated the government's power, which was actually diluted by inefficiency and corruption. The point is debatable; and even if it were granted it would not change the cultural fact that Russians at mid-century lived their lives as if the government was all-powerful (see, for example, Starr, S. Frederick, Decentralization and Selj-Govemment in Russia, 1830-70 [Princeton, 1972]).Google Scholar

24. “Neskol'ko myslei o sovremennom znachenii russkogo dvorianstva,” Turgenev, Sochineniia, 14: 299-304. An interesting account of how this attitude came into being is given by Marc, Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

25. Turgenev, Pis'ma, 2: 160.