SOURCE: Silbajoris, Rimvydas. “Images and Structures in Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook.” Slavic and East European Journal 28, no. 2 (summer 1984): 180-91.

In the following essay, Silbajoris discusses the ways in which the aesthetic principals of Ivan Turgenev inform the realist social critique expressed in his short story collection Sportsman's Notebook.

The most common traditional readings of Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook pertain to its social and political aspects and hold that the stories collected there represent Turgenev's intense moral and artistic effort to speak out against the institution of serfdom, as if in fulfillment of his “Hannibalic Oath.”¹ Some of the stories, however, do not in themselves suggest such a clear-cut purpose, much less any definite program of action. Victor Ripp, a modern reader, adds a qualifying note to the established view:

The constraints on the Russian political imagination is [sic!] the unstated theme of Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. Though he once...