Some notes on Turgenev's narrative framework in Sportsman's Notebook

Toward the end of Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook IT pretty much gives up on the driving concept, that the sketches are the observations of the sporting narrator or are narratives that he listens to from the people he encounters (or in one case overhears); the long story about the life and death of 2 eccentric lifelong friends (long Russian names that I won't even try to remember and re-create), both once-prosperous landowners who lost their fortune through greed and poor management is an example: The narrator encounters these eccentrics as he's off hunting game when one of them rides up to him out of nowhere and asks by what right is the narrator hunting on this land. After he learns narrator is an "aristocrat" he invites him to continue hunting and to visit him at the manor house. The narrator says he became curious about this man and then says some thing like: And this is what I learned about him. So we might as well just say this is a story that the author has concocted, not a report from one of his shooting expeditions. But so be it - the story has to stand on its own in either event (we recognize pretty early in this volume that the hunting sketches are just a vehicle that carries good narratives), and I think it does, esp when coupled with the much longer 2nd story, the longest piece in the collection and one that apparently IT added in a newly published edition about 20 years after the first edition. In the 2nd part of the story the wealthy spendthrift, morose upon the death of his friend, squanders everything and his entire fortune comes down to a beautiful horse, which a Jewish man provided for him in gratitude for his stepping in to save the man from a brutal beating by a crowd of anti-Semitic thugs (first instance of this theme in the collection, and it speaks well of the spoiled aristocrat, despite his other annoying qualities). The counterpart today would be a man in complete debt who maintains a beautiful Jag or Rolls Royce. But one night the horse escapes from the barn - or is stolen in the night - I haven't finished reading this story yet - ruining the man's life. This note is in keeping with the increasing darkness of the sketches as we proceed through the collection, as discussed in yesterday's post. 



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