As a work of 19th-century Russian literature, it is no surprise that the Sketches contains much suffering in it. In keeping with his role as an interested yet detached observer, Turgenev simply describes the plight of his characters “as it is”, appended with only a few heartfelt or ironic comments from himself, never going beyond what would be reasonable for him as an observer and participant in these stories.
Suffering in the Sketches is not of a uniform kind, and it defies the obvious and one-dimensional characterization of the landed class oppressing the peasant. Through his characteristically impartial depiction of his characters’ small and great tragedies, the true critique Turgenev seems to be mounting of serfdom is not simply that it enables the one-sided oppression of the peasantry by the gentry, but that it brutally and insensibly limits the individual to the role he is given at birth to play.
If there is a common theme to the various accounts of suffering in the Sketches, it is the same as that of any individualistic critique of a prevailing system or society: the hard-headed and shrewd ones that accept their place in the system and learn to manipulate it to their ends are content regardless of their position, whereas sensitive souls that try to pursue personal and heartfelt aims find themselves in opposition to the system and are inevitably punished by it, becoming objects of pity for the writer and the reader. It is these most meaningful and poignant of human tragedies that bring into stark relief the injustices of serfdom.
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In Yermolay and the Miller’s Wife and Pyotr Petrovich Karataev, we see how the system forecloses the possibility of love by giving landowners the arbitrary right to withhold permission for the marriage of their serfs. A serf-owner could not only disallow a peasant’s marriage, but even punish a woman for wanting to do so by exiling her to some rural outpost and consigning her lover to the army. In Karataev’s case the old lady even refuses his offer to buy his beloved’s freedom purely, one imagines, out of spite for the happiness of young love. The offending characters in both stories come across as pathetic figures themselves; mediocre personalities that find their only joy and justification for life in the mean power they wield over the ones dependent on them.
In a more personal story, the Meeting shows a peasant girl pining over the love of a valet to a nobleman, who caught up in the ill-earned vanity of his own minor status, has little regard for her tender affections. Of the many colourful personalities depicted in the Sketches, not one succeeds in crossing the chasm of status on the tightrope of love.
The only sanctioned attitude towards the relationship between men and women is a typically patriarchal and transactional one, as evidenced in Khor and Kalinych and Farmer Ovsyanikov. These depict two men, who with their steadfast adherence to traditional Russian rural values, including the concept of masculinity, impress the writer with their maturity, shrewdness, and contentment, but also illustrate the subjugation of the individual by the system necessary for these conditions.
On the other hand, Radilov (My Neighbour Radilov) after dutifully yet unhappily upholding the mores of his class for most of his life, elopes with his dead wife’s sister, causing great social upheaval. It is not the controversy caused by this affair that is so remarkable – this would still be the case even in our permissive modern times – but the fact that such a generic example of a landowner could harbor such desires and act on them, giving up his entire position and way of life in the process. In fact, in the case of Radilov, Turgenev already suspects something is amiss before the affair happens, a suspicion that never arises in his mind for Khor or Farmer Ovsyanikov:
“I was struck by the fact that I couldn’t find in him any passion for food or wine or hunting … Studying Radilov closely I couldn’t ever imagine him happy, either now or at any time.”
Radilov, in spite of all external appearances, is at heart a sensitive man, who deeply loved his wife but didn’t show any signs of grief when she died of childbirth. And yet, on the second day of her death:
“The next morning I went in to see her … Suddenly I saw … One of her eyes wasn’t completely shut and over this eye a fly was walking … I collapsed like scythed corn and when I came to I cried and cried and simply couldn’t stop myself …”
It is hard to imagine Khor having the same reaction, for he believes:
“A woman is a worker about the house … a woman looks after a man.”
As it happens, Radilov is a landowner, and so significantly higher up in the social hierarchy than both Khor (a serf) and Farmer Ovsyanikov (a peasant-farmer). Why then, is Radilov the unhappy one?
Radilov’s mistake is in loving his wife, and then (more controversially) his sister-in-law, whereas Khor and Farmer Ovsyanikov have the “correct” attitude, of seeing women as merely functional beings that exist to work in the house and raise the family, and marriage as a bloodless business affair.
The contrast between the satisfaction of Khor and Farmer Ovsyanikov on one hand and the unhappiness of Radilov on the other shows how for one to be content in the system one must accept its well-defined boundaries, knowing that trespassing them even slightly is to risk everything. And yet, if one is robbed of his passion or prevented from pursuing it owing to the bounds the system has placed on him, nothing that his position has to offer in return can compensate.
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Serfdom, and one might say, society in general, is no place for the idealistic. They are tolerated to the extent that they do no harm, and in fact, the most harm they do is to themselves, through the self-inflicted torment that is a consequence of acting on beliefs generally praised in words but condemned in practice. Kasyan (Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands), Chertopkhanov (Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin, The End of Chertopkhanov) and Pyotr Petrovich Karataev (Pyotr Petrovich Karataev) are three such idealists to whose varying levels of personal tragedy Turgenev devotes some of his longest sketches.
Kasyan, an old dwarf who Turgenev encounters on one of his hunting expeditions, is a strange outcast, a “holy man” and healer, and also the only character who questions the ethics of hunting itself, depicted with remarkable self-awareness and honesty by this most passionate of hunters. A self-confessed “poor worker”, Kasyan is of no use to the system, and is doubly useless because of his steadfast belief in God and the sanctity of nature, which according to him provide enough for everyone without the need to resort to “sins” like hunting. His only source of happiness is a little girl called Annushka, a distant relative, who picks flowers and mushrooms from the fields and as a child, has the same innocence about nature as Kasyan himself. On the whole, however, he is an unhappy man – not, one suspects, because of his poverty, but because of his values that make him useless to the system and an object of ridicule in the eyes of people, thus imposing on him a dreary solitude.
In contrast to Kasyan is Yermolay, the narrator’s hunting companion and assistant, a loveable rascal type who “had been rejected as a man unfit for any kind of real work”, and to whom “the meanest house-serf felt himself superior”, and yet who is grudgingly admired for his abilities as a hunter. While Kasyan and Yermolay share the same circumstances, the latter if not a happy man, is always in good humour. Yermolay is a shrewd operator, who knows how to make his way in the world, including how to use his master’s passion for hunting towards his own ends. In other words, he accepts his place in the world and uses his skill and cunning to carve out a place in it for himself, in spite of the challenges of his position and nature. Kasyan has a similarly singular skill – that of “healing” and a mystical ability to influence nature (he claims to have cast a spell on the prey in the woodlands visited by the narrator, so none appeared and the hunt was a failure), but since it is of no use to either his fellow-men or a higher-up like the narrator, he must languish in oblivion. Yermolay, a realist, has only to suffer from the general poverty and oppression of serfdom, whereas Kasyan has the additional burden of his ideals which prohibit the enjoyment of even the small perks of his inferior position.
A whole separate article of equal length can be written on the tragedies of Chertopkhanov and Karataev, but suffice it to say, these characters suffer for exactly the same reason: they seek to live by ideals – of nobility, love, courage, conduct – ideals without which their life is meaningless, but by upholding which they lose everything. Chertopkhanov’s story is especially poignant, and is the only one that has more than one sketch devoted to it. It covers the entire life of an eccentric, impoverished landowner belonging to the countryside, a Quixotic figure who is kind, courageous, and noble, yet temperamental, cruel, short-sighted and vain. Both virtues and vices can be traced to a deeply-held conviction about the behavior that his status as a noble requires of him; nothing in him originates from the typically shrewd, calculating, or callous instincts of self-preservation and habit found in his peers from other Sketches. And yet, it is his life that becomes a series of tragedies while the others carry on unperturbed.
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Suffering, in Turgenev’s world, can afflict anyone, anywhere, for any reason. Being at the lower end of the totem pole in society makes it more likely and habitual, but the ones on the higher end are by no means exempt. What matters, as always, is having the right attitude towards it. This means acceptance of one’s place in the “natural” order of things, fealty to prevailing values, and resignation to the vicissitudes of fate. Within the triangle so etched out lies the space where the individual may exist and even thrive in a limited sense. Those who walk outside the prescribed lines are at the mercy not only of fate, always and everywhere a cruel mistress, but of the arbitrariness of an unjust system of oppression. But the irony is that even those who remain within the boundaries are victims of a subtler, yet more insidious, conspiracy: that of being sullen mediocrities, content with a dull, stupefying, and soon to be outmoded existence.
Could it be otherwise? If the tragedy of serfdom is that, on one hand it is an ossified system of oppression that assigns unfair roles to people based not on distinction or merit but birth; and that on the other, suffering is caused in proportion to the degree one differs from one’s type, the cause of which is usually idealism, then one must do away with this system of types, and replace it with something fairer. A society that permits individualism and personal choice under a commonly accepted system of ethics would appear to be a solution, one which Turgenev probably favored as a “Westernizer”.
This seems to have been accomplished in our modern era, which is far more progressive and permissive than Turgenev’s time. Individualism is its clarion call, although I would personally argue we have fewer individuals now. Have we truly achieved this annihilation of types, and a fairer system for the recognition and reward of merit? Can the individualistic and idealistic person thrive in our current society? Or will he still be afflicted with the struggle for acceptance and validation that Kasyan, Chertopkhanov, and Radilov faced? Is our attitude towards death and misfortune superior to those of 19th-century Russians? Are our friendships and relationships stronger?
To ascribe the suffering depicted in Turgenev’s Sketches to simply the oppressiveness of serfdom is to rob the work of its universality as a critique of society’s inevitable limitation of the individual. I believe that our modern time is similarly opposed to idealism, and similarly a cause of profound suffering, for it robs us of even those ideals that serfdom paid lip service to and gives nothing in return. Thus in reading Turgenev, a modern can find succor in the accounts of these colorful characters who despite their difficult circumstances and in opposition to society, still nurtured ideals, found respite in nature, and happiness, if only precariously, in the bonds of friendship, family, and love.
Sanchit Creates 
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