A Sportsman's Sketches
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Author
Тургенев Иван Сергеевич
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General Book Summary
"A Sportsman's Sketches" is a cycle of stories by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, united by the image of a narrator-hunter wandering through the Oryol and Tula provinces. Through the lens of hunting travels, the author creates a gallery of vivid portraits of Russian peasants and landowners, revealing the depth of the people's soul and the harsh conditions of serfdom. In the presented stories, two works occupy central place: "Bezhin Meadow" and "Biryuk." In "Bezhin Meadow," the narrator, having lost his way during a hunt on a July evening, stumbles upon a group of peasant boys guarding a night herd of horses. Around the fire, five children—Fedya, Pavlusha, Ilyusha, Kostya, and little Vanya—share frightening stories about house spirits, mermaids, wood goblins, and other evil forces. Through their simple tales emerges the folk worldview, superstitions, and poetic perception of nature. Particularly notable is the brave and sensible Pavlusha, whose tragic death from a fall off a horse is mentioned at the end of the story. In the story "Biryuk," the hunter gets caught in a thunderstorm and finds shelter with forester Foma, nicknamed Biryuk for his gloomy and unsociable nature. Despite his reputation as an incorruptible and stern guardian of the forest, whom all the local peasants fear, Biryuk turns out to be a deeply unhappy man: his wife left him with two children, and he lives in extreme poverty. The climax comes with the capture of a peasant wood-thief, whom Biryuk ultimately releases, showing humanity. The central themes of the work are the beauty of Russian nature, described with poetic mastery; the spiritual richness of common people; the social injustice of the serf system; the conflict between duty and compassion. Turgenev creates lyrical landscapes that became models of Russian prose, and portrays peasants not as a faceless mass, but as people with rich inner worlds, dignity, and deep feelings.
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Book Excerpt
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
Notes of a Hunter
Book: I.S. Turgenev. "Notes of a Hunter" Published by "Narodnaya Asveta," Minsk, 1977 OCR & SpellCheck: Zmiy (zpdd@chat.ru), December 25, 2001
Bezhin Meadow
(From the cycle "Notes of a Hunter")
It was a beautiful July day, one of those days that occur only when the weather has settled in for a long time. From earliest morning the sky is clear; the morning glow does not blaze like a fire: it spreads with a gentle blush. The sun—not fiery, not incandescent, as during a scorching drought, not dull crimson, as before a storm, but bright and welcomingly radiant—peacefully rises beneath a narrow, elongated cloud, shines freshly and plunges into its lilac mist. The upper, thin edge of the stretched cloud sparkles like little snakes; their gleam is like that of hammered silver... But now the playful rays burst forth again—and cheerfully and majestically, as if soaring upward, rises the mighty luminary. Around midday there usually appear many round, high clouds, golden-gray, with delicate white edges. Like islands scattered across an infinitely overflowing river, encircled by its deeply transparent channels of even blueness, they scarcely move from their place; farther, toward the horizon, they draw together, crowd close, and the blue between them is no longer visible; but they themselves are as azure as the sky: they are thoroughly permeated with light and warmth. The color of the horizon, light, pale lilac, does not change all day and is the same all around; nowhere does it darken, nowhere does a storm gather; only here and there bluish streaks stretch from top to bottom: barely noticeable rain is falling. Toward evening these clouds disappear; the last of them, blackish and indefinite as smoke, lie in pink billows opposite the setting sun; at the place where it has set as calmly as it rose calmly into the sky, a scarlet glow stands for a brief time over the darkened earth, and, quietly flickering, as if carefully carried like a candle, the evening star kindles upon it. On such days all colors are softened; bright, but not vivid; everything bears the stamp of some touching gentleness. On such days the heat is sometimes very strong, sometimes it even "steams" along the slopes of the fields; but the wind disperses and pushes aside the accumulated heat, and whirlwinds—an unmistakable sign of constant weather—walk in...