The suffering, the sadness, and the beauty in Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook

Though Turgenev is sympathetic to the peasants and other agricultural workers, in his collection A Sportsman's Notebook, repeatedly finding the peasants, the impoverished, the outsiders far easier to talk to (talk w/) that the landowners and the aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats who are part of Turgenev's set (he appears to be a wealthy young landowner who can spend a great deal of his time hunting and fishing on his and on neighboring lands), he by no means romanticizes the life of the peasant. In fact, his stories and sketches show us the horrible conditions in which many of the peasants live; we see some people near dead from starvation, an old man subsisting on some dried peas and a crust of dried bread that he puts in his toothless mouth to suck, a child living in a one-room cabin w/ her father, a forester, the air thick with smoke, the room dark and cold, no other living family members, and many other examples. Most of all, we see how death is omnipresent in the peasant's daily existence: in one story we see a funeral process for a seemingly healthy 25-year-old man who died unexpectedly, his wife in procession wailing in mourning - but also in fear. What will become of her? How can she survive? One story, called Death, is among the most powerful, as we see a strong  man, a miller I think, who ruptured part of his stomach doing some lifting and shows up at the doctor's after 10 days of suffering - 2 days too late, the doctor says. The man refuses treatment and goes home to prepare to die (took 3 days - none of which we see, in contrast w/ Ivan Ilyich). In that same story, the narrator visits w/ a scholarly young man who is wasting away from consumption, soon to die. They all see to approach death w/out great fear - perhaps it's for some an alleviation of a life of suffering and difficulty. Yet I also have to note that this collection is far from bleak: There's lots of humor, too (the episode of the sinking boat, the hose dealer who sells the narrator a "lemon," the quest for a replacement for a broken axle), and most of all Turgenev includes in ever sketch at least one beautiful passage describing the landscape, the outdoors, and the pleasure of life in nature, even that of a hunter (one character criticizes the hunter for killing innocent animals for sport, even for game). Surely, Hemingway was familiar w/ Turgenev's work, and influenced and inspired by him. 


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