Further thoughts on Trugenev's Sportman's Notebook and its influence

The sketches in Ivan Turgenev's difficult-to-classify A Sportsman's Notebook - much like short stories, but also like short essays or pieces of journalism, albeit w/ much re-created dialog and perhaps with some authorial license - continue to engage and amuse me. Each one involves the rather transparent narrator - seemingly Turgenev himself, and an avid hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman whose expeditions into the villages of the Russian forests and steppe (not too far from Moscow, ca 1850) lead him to encounters with a wide array of eccentrics and "types," of all social classes, as well as to some adventures: for ex., after a long day's hunting accompanied only by his dog, the narrator gets lost and confused as darkness falls and realizes he's been heading off course on his way toward home, spots in a valley by a river or stream a small bonfire or camp fire; he heads toward the fire, is greeted by two hostile dogs, then encounters a group of 5 peasant boys - teens and preteens - who earn some money in the summer (and have fun) bringing horses out to graze at night (apparently blackflies are too intensive for the horses in the summer months). He settles in for the night beside the campfire and listens to the chatter of the boys - w/ a few leading questions of his own - and through this experience we get a great sense of the peasant superstitions, particularly about ghosts, and also of typical campfire chatter of boys then and, I hope, now as well. Throughout, Turgenev's sympathies are more with the peasants than with any other class: overworked, exploited by a new system that charges them rent in return for supposed freedom. His most bitter and satirical story so far - about half-way through this 400-page collection - concerns a highly pretentious landowner so full of himself and so abusive of his staff - although he's too stupid to realize his foreman is cheating him right and left. It's obvious that this collection was influential - not only on the obvious followers such as Chekhov but I think on some American writers as well. Doesn't Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, owe a debt to Turgenev, a portrait of a region at one particular moment in (recent past) history, through a series of sketches about the denizens and their hopes and fears, seen through a single authorial consciousness? 
 
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