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20050403.01
Notes on Turgenev's Hunting Sketches
To the extent that the words which we use have the same
meaning for all of us, language is the basis of intellectual
uniformity and of social unity. There comes, however, a
point where the individuality of different minds asserts
itself, where the presumption of uniform meaning is
discredited, where a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence or
even a word has meanings which differ according to the
interpreting individual. Such is the case, in greater or
lesser degree, with works of poetry. A story or a poem not
infrequently functions like a prism which fractionates the
apparently homogeneous social mind into distinguishable,
divergent, mutually incompatible opinions. It seems to me,
or at least in my experience, Turgenev's Hunting Sketches
are such a work.
Meaning or significance in a work of literature is both
intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic meaning derives
immediately from the text, and can be inferred without
reference to historical or other theoretical considerations.
Extrinsic meaning arises from the projection of the text
onto an historical or otherwise theoretical framework.
Obviously intrinsic and extrinsic meaning will overlap. The
intrinsic meaning is entwined with the imagery and cadence
of the Russian and is largely masked in translation. The
translator's sensibilities become a filter which attenuates
or amplifies, obscures or clarifies the intrinsic meaning of
the original text.
Even so, some inkling of the intrinsic meaning of
Turgenev's Hunting Sketches is apparent on the face of the
text: the dispassionate characterization of the Russian
serfs, of their conversation, their lifestyle, their
relationships to each other and to their masters, the
painstaking description of the landscape, especially of the
sky, of sunrise and sunset, of the brightness of day and the
gloom of night. These accounts demonstrate the skills of
Turgenev and of the various translators as artists. Such
accounts effect also to sharpen the perception and broaden
the imaginative world of the reader.
The extrinsic meaning of Turgenev's Hunting Sketches
may be sought: a) in the social and political implications
of his accounts, b) in his relationship to the other writers
of fiction, both Russian, European and American, who
preceded him, who were his contemporaries, and who followed
him. Subject to my limited knowledge, I find the differences
to be more striking than the similarities, and finally, c)
most important to my mind, but also most difficult and
_________________________________
Copyright 2005 Ernst Jochen Meyer
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treacherous, in the explication of Turgenev's work in what,
for lack of better terms, one might call a philosophical, an
existential, or a spiritual context.
To begin with the title: The term "sketch" is an
unambiguous allusion to a rough, tentative drawing, showing
the outlines only of objects of interest, distinct not only
from a more detailed and exhaustive depiction, but distinct
especially from the history of the object, with its
intrinsic temporal accounting of genesis, efflorescence
fruiting, withering and dying. A sketch is to be looked at
and thus to be integrated into a world that is seen. A
history, on the contrary, is meant to be told, to be
recited, to be heard, and thus to be integrated into the
world that is remembered. Accordingly a literary sketch as
distinct from a (hi)story presents cognitive and hermeneutic
difficulties which are reflected in the complaint that
Turgenev's Sketches are "difficult" to read, because there
is no story.
It is arguable also that a sketch evinces a degree of
detachment which a history cannot attain. The viewer of a
sketch (or any other picture) is and remains separate from
that which he sees in a way in which the narrator can never
dissociate himself from that which he tells, and in a way in
which the hearer can never dissociate himself from what he
hears. Hence absent from Turgenev's work are all
intimations of involvement, of passion, of fear, of love and
of hate.
The dispassionate, uncommitted, unloving relationship
to the world is epitomized by the appearance of the novelist
as hunter. And it is at this juncture that Turgenev's
authorship and his private life overlap; for if one is to
believe the biographers, Turgenev was a passionate hunter in
private life, and the Hunter's Sketches were suggested by a
collection of hunting memoirs, Souvenirs de Chasses, by one
Louis Viardot, who himself in turn was the husband of
Pauline, a famous singer whom Turgenev met in 1843 "and with
whom he was to remain on terms of close intimacy until his
death in 1883." Turgenev and Louis Viardot "were not only
in love with the same woman, they were also in love with
hunting."
The elucidation of these concurrent passions is a task
for the psychoanalyst. The literary critic need only observe
that the purpose of hunting is to kill, and killing is the
vicarious experience of death, whose shadow hovers over each
one of Turgenev's Sketches in a different way. In the
sketch entitled "Death", Turgenev writes of the contractor
who had been struck by a falling tree: "He started trembling
all over, like a shot bird, and straightened up. `He's
dead', the peasants said." Each time the Hunter shoots a
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bird, he extinguishes a life: and while a bird's life is not
the same as a human life, Turgenev himself defines the
significance of his huntsmanship when he equates the
trembling of the dying bird with the trembling of a dying
man.
I am reminded of Wilhelm Mueller's poem "Die liebe
Farbe", set to music in Schubert's Schoene Muellerin: "Das
Wild das ich jage, das ist der Tod, Die Heide, die heiss'
ich die Liebesnoth." (The game that I hunt is death, and
the heath where I hunt is called love's distress.)
I am reminded also of Rilkes Sonnet:
Manche, des Todes, entstand ruhig geordnete Regel,
weiterbezwingender Mensch, seit du im Jagen beharrst;
mehr doch als Falle und Netz, weiss ich dich, Streifen von Segel,
den man hinuntergehaengt in den hoehligen Karst.
Leise liess man dich ein, als waerst du ein Zeichen,
Frieden zu feiern. Doch dann: rang dich am Rande der Knecht,
- und aus den Hoehlen, die Nacht warf eine Handvoll von bleichen
taumelnden Tauben ans Licht... Aber auch das ist im Recht.
Fern von dem Schauenden sei jeglicher Hauch des Bedauerns,
nicht nur vom Jaeger allein, der, was sich zeitig erweist,
wachsam und handelnd vollzieht.
Toeten ist eine Gestalt unseres wandernden Trauerns ...
Rein ist im heiteren Geist,
was an uns selber geschieht.
The death which the hunter inflicts is an exercise of
power, a show of dominion over life, a demonstration of his
own immunity. The slaughtered grouse or partridge or
pheasant is the hunter's sacrificial offering to nature by
which he deems to ensure and confirm his own vitality.
Clearly, the ritual killing is doomed to failure, and the
vicarious death which the hunter inflicts on his quarry does
not protect him. That death proves to be an anticipation,
recognized or otherwise, of his own demise. For ultimately
death has meaning to each of us only as a subjective event,
as something that will happen to me or is happening to me
even now.
Turgenev's sketches are notable for the absence of
love, devoid of affectionate sweethearts or doting mothers.
Girls, instead of objects of desire or affection, are but
servants of cruel mistresses, targets of predatory males,
spiritually crippled or mutilated victims, abandoned by
those who have hunted them down, who end their lives as
field hands or domestic slaves on the lowermost tier of
servitude. On this barbarous landscape, western culture
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remains little more than an alien curiosity. There are
allusions to Shakespeare, to Goethe and Schiller, but there
is no apprehension of the ideas or the emotions that they
inspire or that inspired them. Goethe and Schiller are
invoked in name only: The Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky
district is not even the remotest of cousins to the Hamlet
of Elsinore.
Friendships among men are realized in the companionship
of hunters. The most one can say is that it is preferable
that the muzzles of their guns should be pointed at animals
rather than at each other. Specifically, instead of the
duel over Pauline to which Viardot might have challenged
Turgenev they go hunting together, in spirit if not in fact.
"Wo keine Goetter walten, walten Gespenster," said
Novalis. Religious experience is nowhere to be perceived,
presumably hidden behind monastery walls or buried in the
crypts of churches. The rumblings of goblins on the Brezhin
Meadows are voiceless echos of inchoate, undefined,
unidentifiable spiritual forces. No angels, not even devils
are anywhere in sight. Suffering leads not to God; it leads
to nowhere, and the meaning of death is epitomized by the
annoyance with an overly stuffed game bag whose strap rubs
painfully into the hunter's shoulder.
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