Turgenev’s Sketches from A Hunter’s Album: On The Value of Nature

This is part one of a series of posts exploring Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches From A Hunter’s Album.

I recently finished reading Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches From A Hunter’s Album. It is a compilation of short “sketches” about Russian country life written by Turgenev whilst hunting on his mother’s estate in the early 19th-century, and was first published in 1852. This series is credited as Turgenev’s first major literary work, and an important contribution to public support for the abolition of serfdom, for which he was put under house arrest by the Russian government.

I first read Turgenev at University when I picked up his Fathers and Sons from the library. At the time I was deeply interested in Russian history and literature, especially the period from the late-19th century to the early-20th century when the monarchy collapsed and Communism took over. To an outsider like me it appeared to be a time of intense soul-searching for a country that had deep spiritual roots in its “Orientalism”, but that nevertheless aspired to be at par with, if not superior to, its Western European rivals. Of course, this time (not coincidentally) also produced the literary greats Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which in itself was reason enough to be interested.

My broader interest at the time was to understand why some nations succeeded in harmonizing their culture and modernity, reaping the fruits of both, while others (such as India) failed. Russia – with its inner conflict, its Eastern mystique, its seriousness about spirituality and human nature, its acceptance of suffering in the pursuit of a higher goal – had me enraptured, and I wanted to read as much as I could while I still had access to one of the richest library systems in the world.

Turgenev, at least to me, was not as well known as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. However, his Fathers and Sons seemed to be one of the high watermarks of the literary output that resulted from this period of intense of ideological introspection. To put it another way, for someone interested in the mindsets of that time, I could not overlook it. What struck me about Fathers and Sons, which I recall to this day, almost eight years later, is the quality of the prose: gentle, light, yet penetrating and illuminating – it was like the rays of a winter sun. It was no less brilliant than Tolstoy, whose Sevastopol Sketches I had recently read and admired for the same reasons.

The brilliance of Russian writers, it seems to me, is that through their method of mere description they simultaneously engage the reader’s interest in the rather quotidian affairs of ordinary characters and illustrate nuances, themes, and philosophical truths in a way that the reader feels he has independently arrived at them himself – which makes him even more awestruck at the depth and finesse of the writer himself. It is a hard feeling to describe, but I am sure if you read one of these works, you will know what I am talking about. In how they portray the small, unremarkable interactions of characters that are not more fanciful than those of living people, they reveal small and great truths of life without the need to “analyze”. To them does not apply Nietzsche’s adage: “Most thinkers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of the thoughts”.

That is not to say that these writers are not trying to “say” something through their works. While deeply moralistic themes run through the narrative, they are not imposed upon the reader’s mind as something separate from the events being described. If you look at a wild rose, and in looking at it enjoy its beauty but also wonder at the meaning of its existence and the tragedy of its eventual death when it is plucked thoughtlessly by a child, you have experienced an analogy to the best of Russian literature.

This quality of writing manifested in me like a warm memory, the sole impression of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons that I retained eight years later when I ordered my copy of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, published by Penguin under their Penguin Classics series. Why did I return to Turgenev now when I was no longer an impressionable University student and when my broad interest in the fate of nations had faded into the meaner personal anxiety over the everyday affairs of a working adult? To answer this question, I must talk a little about the work itself, and my impressions of it.

Turgenev’s Sketches is considered remarkable for illustrating two qualities that became associated with his ouvre as a writer: achingly beautiful descriptions of nature and a moral discomfort with the plight of the Russian peasantry under serfdom. The former was even confirmed by Tolstoy himself, who shared a complicated relationship with Turgenev and considered this the work’s most remarkable and even “moral” quality. In Turgenev’s persistent and intentional odes to the beauty of nature in each of his sketches, Tolstoy found a vindication of his own morality, especially later in his life with his turn to Christianity and outspoken rejection of modernity and technological progress.

The primacy of these “themes” in the Sketches are impossible to deny; they would be obvious to the most casual reader. Where a modern reader is accustomed to distinguishing morality as “subtext” from the plot’s “text”, the beauty of nature and the plight of the peasantry in Turgenev’s Sketches appear very much as the text. There is no attempt by Turgenev to slide them into the background, or to arrive at them in a roundabout way. But for this exact reason, these “themes” aren’t really themes: they are as much the subject of the Sketches as the characters and their story themselves. That is to say, in my reading, Turgenev is not conveying a moral message about the superiority of nature over man, or of the inherent morality of the peasantry who are held back by an unfair system of exploitation. If all one sees in the Sketches is a mere morality, one excises it of most of its value as a work of literary art, and reduces it to an elaborately written manifesto.

Perhaps it suits our modern sensibilities to put the work in an understandable category that illustrates its “value”. But to me, the true value of the Sketches is far more sublime, becoming apparent when one reads it as it is: a description of rural Russian life in the 19th century as observed by an astutely observant and opinionated aristocrat fond of hunting.

Nature is a big part of the Sketches, not only because it is the backdrop of all the events that occur therein, but also because the experience of its beauty brings great personal joy to Turgenev himself through the act of hunting, which allows him a functional and intimate relationship with it. His descriptions of the beauty of the sunrise and sunset, of the twittering of birds and the freshness of wild flowers, of rows of planted rye swaying in the breeze and the silence of the steppe at dawn, are not the platitudes of an urbanite on holiday straining his imagination from the comfort of a hotel room or railway carriage. It is the passionate expression of a man who has spent many idle and busy hours in nature, been abetted and frustrated in equal measure by it in the pursuit of his goals, who has developed a healthy appreciation of its value and is now unable to restrain from expressing his love for it.

I confess that I sometimes found these paeans to nature overwrought to the point that I skipped past a few with the feeling that I had got the point several times already. Turgenev’s fascination with natural phenomenon is inexhaustible, and sometimes to the detriment the overall narrative of the sketch in question. But when it is done right, which it is more often than not, one can’t help feeling that sense of nostalgia and longing, where things are frozen in time, when one can just stop and wonder at the rustling of leaves, singing of birds, grass being gently caressed by the wind, the drowsiness under the afternoon sun. A time when one has nowhere to go, nothing to do, but just be in the stillness and quiet of a sleepy meadow.

Being immersed in Turgenev’s world makes me all the more resentful of our modern world, where like everything else, the experience of nature is commoditized, and where technology ensures that one is never really in the present. At the same time, Turgenev’s descriptions of nature, while extensive and elaborate, never cross the line into becoming moralistic and prescriptive, unlike our modern obsession with making a packaged and sanitized experience of nature the antidote to the ugliness of our daily lives. The value of reading Turgenev’s writing today is the affirmation that there was once a way of life that was simpler and in connection with nature, and that people lived back then as they do today, with various levels of awareness, tragedy, and triumph, and that nature does not exist to serve any human purpose but is a phenomenon unto itself that can elevate the human spirit and relieve us from our despair but can not be the antidote to our problems.

In this way, Turgenev is an outcast, for while he belongs to this category of the idle rich, he has a passion for nature that is not universally shared either by the rich or the poor, but rather by other outcasts such as the old dwarf Kasyan (Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands) and the poor paralyzed Lukeria (Living Relic). In his accounts, we do not see an idealized peasantry that lives in harmony with nature and animals, as is often portrayed in works sympathetic to the “natural way of life” nor a high-minded aristocracy that seeks to preserve nature from encroachment and destruction by an uninformed, short-sighted populace, as is the case with the modern ecological narrative that pits the need for environmental sustainability against people’s livelihoods and demand for goods.

This brings me to what interested me in the Sketches to begin with. By the time I decided to read it, I had already familiarized myself with 19th- and 20th-century critiques of modernity: notably Tolstoy’s What is to be done? and A Confession, and Thoreau’s Walden. Unlike these more polemical works, Turgenev’s Sketches was a more un-self-aware, descriptive account of that bygone way of life, perhaps purer in content and meaning because of its lack of an overt agenda.

For example, I was particularly struck by the description of a tavern and its owner that forms the setting for the singing match in the sketch titled Singers. As Turgenev described the character of the tavern owner and how he managed his business, I realized that in our world today, bars and public houses are no more than distribution of standardized bottled drinks manufactured in factories. Even where micro-breweries exist, the emphasis on marketing and branding remains the same. Almost every moment of our life we are propagandized and harangued by advertisement to choose one thing or another. Whatever “local flavour” remains anywhere is an artificial construct, a sort of self-aware alternative to our standardized, commercialized world. The only places where such things remain authentically are those where poverty or natural circumstances have made the reach of capital unprofitable, for the time being.

If such “authenticity” is sometimes preserved at a cost for the rich and exclusive, it is entirely uprooted from the everyday lives of the masses, who are otherwise engaged with the modern way of life. By contrast, in the Sketches, we see that the simple natural way of life is common to everyone except the rich, who sequester themselves away from natural life, believing it to be fit for peasants and laborers, and engage with it only out of a passion for a leisure activity like hunting.

The value of a work like Turgenev’s Sketches, in as far as it relates to nature as such, is that it gives a firsthand perspective of a way of life that was yet to be transformed by the corporation and industrial mode of production. The writer never fails to find something remarkable and worth observing in settings like taverns, horse fairs, countryside estates, and characters like peasants, minor landlords, impoverished nobles, etc., which would not be considered otherwise special by his readership, who existed in exactly this milieu. It is this un-self-conscious and honest delight in observation and description that allows the reader to appreciate this way of life without feeling manipulated or prodded in anyway, much as one would feel when looking at a classical landscape, such as one painted by Millet.

It is not idyllic by any means, for the luscious descriptions of nature are quickly followed by accounts of the misery of peasant life under serfdom, the other major “theme” of this work. And in this second feature of the work, we see that the condition of the peasants is due first and foremost to the inequality of relations between the peasantry and the nobility, and that even the nobility suffers its own significant trepidations and tragedies while enjoying this superiority that, unbeknownst to them, will disappear in the course of little more than a half-century.

It is not a stretch of the imagination to connect this inequality of relations to the prevailing mode of production and ownership of land, and the backwardness of rural life. This, ahem, “juxtaposition” (some habits of University never die) of idyllic nature and human suffering imparts an honesty to the Sketches that saves it from the valid criticism often directed at similar such works, that they airbrush away the problems of pre-modernity to produce an exalted, nostalgic, and almost fictional account that panders to the sensibilities of those wary of modern industrial life.

In the face of these contrasting narratives, one wonders that if the purported value of industrialization was an equalization of the relations between the rich and poor, the landed and the un-landed, and an improvement in the life of the latter, was it necessarily to happen at the cost of this natural way of life? Did we (or more appropriately, the peasantry) gain that much in the bargain thereby?

Has industrialization and modernity fulfilled its promise to the extent that this cost is justified*? If our modern life is such an advance, why do we today commodify nature as an antidote to our problems, when hitherto we seemed to simply exist in it? Can a natural life be lived without falling back into this inequality of relations – are the two so inextricably linked? And can we hearken back to this now seemingly bygone way of life, and should we even want to?

Straddling such dichotomies, these are the questions that the Sketches leaves me with.

*A possible answer to this question can be found in the Living Relic, where the narrator offers to take the paralyzed and debilitated Lukeria to a proper hospital in town where she can be treated with the most advanced medical methods. Lukeria is grateful but refuses the offer, having had doctors attempt to diagnose and treat her previously in the interest of “science”, but to no avail. Instead she gracefully accepts her fate and takes comfort in being in the company of small animals and observing the phenomenon of nature around her.