Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook and its influence on Chekhov

Took me a bit to get into it, but I'm starting to think that Ivan Turgenev's first published work, A Sportsman's Notebook (ca 1850?) is really good, though hard to classify, if that matters. In a sense they're a collection of about 20 essays, each about a character living in the Russian countryside, encountered by the author/narrator during his many hunting and fishing expeditions on or near his landholdings. I believe these ran as a series in a weekly magazine, and as such I think Turgenev was ahead of his time: lots of magazines in the heyday ran series of essays by staff writers, and I could imagine the New Yorker running these kinds of essays today, albeit not on a weekly or monthly schedule. Are they essays or stories? I'd go w/ stories, as obviously Turgenev had to re-create or even create vast stretches of dialog, and he may have made up some of these characters or made them into composites; journalism is strict about the rules today - probably less so in the mid-19th century - and IT was again ahead of his time in leaving these unclassified rather than claiming complete veracity. Each of the essays - I've read the first 5 or 6 - is charming and moving and at times surprising: IT is forthright in his critique of social classes, and he really conveys the hardship of peasant life - even though there are various passages the capture the beauty of rustic life, sleeping in piles of hay and straw under the stars, cooking potatoes over an open fire, etc., he doesn't romanticize the outdoor life either; it's one thing for a landowner to go hunting for sport, it's another to try to survive on caught game and fish, or to endure life as a servant for one's so-called betters. In one great passage the narrator asks a fellow landowner, formerly a tenant farmer, about his grandfather and learns that this grandfather was cruel and brutal to the peasants and seized land from them in blatant disregard for laws of property. One of the fines pieces so far is a country doctor's narrative (the narrator, like most journalists, is a great listener) about an episode in his life when he fell in love with a young, dying patient. This story obviously makes us think of Chekhov (not just his "medical" stories but also his journalism and many stories that capture the same mood of hopeless love and loneliness, notably The Kiss). IT must have been a great influence on Chekhov, who also wrote about all classes in society and always captured the same mood of wistfulness and longing, of suffering amid natural beauty. 
 
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