Turgenev's 1852 collection of interconnected stories follows a Russian landowner's hunting expeditions across the countryside, revealing the humanity and dignity of serfs through encounters that challenged contemporary social attitudes. These sketches of rural life helped galvanize opposition to serfdom while establishing Turgenev as a master of psychological realism, presented here in Constance Garnett's acclaimed translation.
Anyone who has chanced to pass from the Bolhovsky district into the Zhizdrinsky district, must have been impressed by the striking difference between the race of people in the province of Orel and the population of the province of Kaluga. The peasant of Orel is not tall, is bent in figure, sullen and suspicious in his looks; he lives in wretched little hovels of aspen-wood, labours as a serf in the fields, and engages in no kind of trading, is miserably fed, and wears slippers of bast: the rent-paying peasant of Kaluga lives in roomy cottages of pine-wood; he is tall, bold, and cheerful in his looks, neat and clean of countenance; he carries on a trade in butter and tar, and on holidays he wears boots. The village of the Orel province (we are speaking now of the eastern part of the province) is usually situated in the midst of ploughed fields, near a water-course which has been converted…Continue reading →
This is the Constance Garnett translation, a public-domain English text. Marginalia presents it unabridged, with chapter navigation, your reading position saved, and optional AI commentary on any passage.
A towering figure of 19th-century Russian literature, this nobleman-turned-writer (1818-1883) masterfully captured the social tensions of his era through psychological realism. His novels, particularly Fathers and Sons, introduced the world to the concept of nihilism while exploring generational conflict with unprecedented nuance and empathy. All works by Ivan Turgenev →
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