The darker side of Turgenev's Sportsman's sketches - and his narrative style

The later sketches/stories in Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook (1850 ca.) turn quite a bit darker than the earlier ones. Though throughout the book we see IT's great sensitivity to suffering and oppression, the overall mood of the early sketches one of celebration of the beauty of the outdoors,  a series of meetings and encounters w/ local eccentrics, and some curious hazards enduring during travel and "shooting" expeditions (getting lost, broken axle, sudden rainstorm, etc.), the characters the narrator encounters in the later sketches are more sorrowful and pitiful. Take these 3 that appear in sequence: A long sketch about a man the narrator encounters who, while waiting for fresh horses in a wayside post, pours out his life story: the fell in love with an indentured servant and tried to buy her freedom from the elderly woman who "owned" her but was turned down flat and they shifted her to a remote farm in another part of the country; he's now on his way to Moscow to seek government work. A year later the narrator encounters him in Moscow, still unemployed, and now a drunken ruin. Then, a story that the narrator overhears while resting in the woods: an attractive servant girl has a rendezvous with a liveried servant who will be leaving her as his master is re-locating to Moscow or western Europe. He is callous and indifferent toward her and she breaks down in sobs, asking him only to say he will miss her, which he refuses to do. Oddly, after he leaves the narrator approaches the young girl – with what in mind? – and she gets frightened (of course) and runs away. 3^rd: Narrator attends and all-male gathering at the house of a wealthy neighbor; the men are put up for the night and have to share rooms. His “roommate” goes into a long lament, the story of his life, about his lack of originality, his obscurity, the death of his young wife – until at last a man in an adjacent room asks them to shut up so he can get some sleep. In the morning, the unoriginal man has gone – leaving us to wonder: Was the narrative real? A dream? A distortion (maybe the narrator’s own story)? These sketches seem to anticipate Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man (which I think came later, not sure), with the strangely confessional and oddly self-aware narrative tone, and also Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, a long story that a passenger encountered in travel reveals to a willing stranger, i.e., the narrator. This narrative device, not too common except maybe in narratives to one’s analyst (see Confessions of Zeno, Portnoy’s complaint) was somewhat in vogue in the early 20^th century (see Ring Lardner). 

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