A Sportsman's Notebook

Stories

Ivan Turgenev

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062968487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Twenty-five beautifully written stories, penned in exile, evocatively depicting life on a manor in feudal Russia and examining the conflicts between serfs and landlords A Sportsman's Notebook, Ivan Turgenev's first literary masterpiece, is a sweeping portrayal of the magnificent nineteenth–century Russian countryside and the harsh lives of those who inhabited it. In a powerful and gripping series of sketches, a hunter wanders through the vast landscape of steppe and forest in search of game, encountering a varied cast of peasants, landlords, bailiffs, overseers, horse traders, and merchants. He witnesses both feudal tyranny and the submission of the tyrannized, against a backdrop of the sublime and pitiless terrain of rural Russia.

These exquisitely rendered stories, now with a stirring introduction from Daniyal Mueenuddin, were not only universally popular with the reading public but, through the influence they exerted on important members of the Tsarist bureaucracy, contributed to the major political event of mid–nineteenth–century Russia: the Great Emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Rarely has a book that offers such undiluted literary pleasure also been so strong a force for significant social change, one that continues to speak to readers centuries later.

The End of Chertopkhanov

I

Two years after my visit, Pantelei’s disasters began—“disasters” is the only word. Disappointments, failures, misfortunes had pursued him even before then; but he paid them no attention and “reigned” as before. The first disaster which struck him was the most painful one of all: Masha left him.

What induced her to forsake his roof, to which she had seemed so well-accustomed, it would be hard to say. Until his dying day, Chertopkhanov remained convinced that the blame for Masha’s treachery lay with a certain young neighbor, a retired captain of Lancers by the name of Yaff, who, in Pantelei’s words, got his way just by perpetually twisting his whiskers, thickly oiling his hair, and sniffing significantly; but it may be supposed that it was rather the effect of the wandering gypsy blood which flowed in Masha’s veins. Anyway, however that may be, one fine summer evening Masha tied a few rags together into a small bundle and walked out of Chertopkhanov’s house.

For three days previous to this she had been sitting in a corner writhing and pressing up against the wall like a wounded vixen. If only she had said a word to somebody—but no, she just rolled her eyes the whole time, looked thoughtful, twitched her eyebrows, bared her teeth slightly, and fidgeted with her hands, as if to wrap herself up. The same sort of mood had come over her before, but had never lasted long; Chertopkhanov knew this, and consequently was not disturbed himself and didn’t disturb her either.

But when returning from the kennels, where, in the words of his whipper-in, the last two hounds had “gone stiff,” he met a maid who announced to him in a trembling voice that Marya Akinfyevna sent her compliments and said that she wished him all the best, but would never return to his house again, Chertopkhanov, after turning round twice where he stood and giving vent to a husky roar, at once dashed after the fugitive—snatching up his pistol on the way.

He found her about two versts from his house, beside a birchwood, on the high road leading to the nearest town. The sun stood low over the horizon and everything round suddenly turned scarlet: trees, grass, and earth.

“To Yaff, to Yaff!” groaned Chertopkhanov as soon as he caught sight of Masha. “To Yaff,” he repeated, running up to her and almost tripping with every step.

Masha halted and turned to face him. She stood with her back to the light—and looked quite black, as if carved in ebony. Only the whites of her eyes showed up as little silver almonds, but her eyes themselves—the pupils—were darker than ever.

She threw her bundle aside and folded her arms.

“You’re on the way to Yaff’s, you hussy!” repeated Chertopkhanov, and tried to seize her by the shoulder, but met her gaze, faltered, and fidgeted where he stood.

“I’m not going to Mr. Yaff’s, Pantelei Eremeich,” answered Masha calmly and evenly. “I just can’t live with you any more.”

“Why can’t you? What for? Have I done anything to offend you?”

Masha shook her head. “You’ve done nothing to offend me, Pantelei Eremeich. I have just got bored living with you. . . . Thanks for times past, but I can’t stay on—no!”

Chertopkhanov was dumbfounded; he even slapped his thighs and jumped up into the air.

“How can that be? You’ve lived, and lived, and known nothing but pleasure and peace—and suddenly: you’re bored! So you tell yourself, I’ll chuck him! You go and throw a handkerchief over your head and set off. You’ve been treated with every respect, the same as a lady.”

“Not that I wanted it at all,” interrupted Masha.

“You didn’t want it? Turned from a wandering gypsy into a lady—you didn’t want it? What d’you mean, you child of Ham? D’you expect me to believe that? There’s treachery behind this, treachery.”

He had begun to hiss with rage again.

“There’s no thought of treachery in my mind and never has been,” said Masha in her clear, sing-song voice. “I’ve already told you: I got bored.”

“Masha,” exclaimed Chertopkhanov, and punched himself in the chest. “Stop, that’s enough, you’ve made me suffer quite enough. Good heavens! Just think what Tisha will say; you might have thought about him!”

“Please give my respects to Tikhon Ivanich and tell him . . .”

Chertopkhanov waved his arms.

“Oh, no, you’re wrong—you won’t get away! Your Yaff can go on waiting for you.”

“Mr. Yaff——” began Masha.

“Mr. Yaff, indeed,” imitated Chertopkhanov. “He’s a twister and a rogue, if ever there was one—and a face like a monkey, too!”

For a whole half-hour Chertopkhanov argued with Masha. Now he would go close up to her, now he would dart away, now he would lift his arm at her, now he would bow to her from the waist and weep and curse.

“I can’t,” asserted Masha. “I’m so sad there . . . so bored and miserable.”

Her face had gradually assumed such an indifferent, almost sleepy expression that Chertopkhanov asked her if she had not taken a nip of thorn-apple spirit.

“Bored,” she said for the tenth time.

“And supposing I were to kill you?” he cried all of a sudden, and pulled the pistol out of his pocket.

Masha smiled; her face became animated. “Why, kill away, Pantelei Eremeich: I’m at your mercy; but one thing I won’t do, and that’s come back.”

“You won’t come back!” Chertopkhanov pulled back the cock.

“No, my dear . . . Never in my life, and I mean it.”

Chertopkhanov suddenly thrust the pistol into her hand and sat down on the grass.

“Well, then, you kill me! I don’t want to live without you. If you’re tired of me—then I’m tired of everything else.”

Masha bent down, picked up her bundle, put the pistol down in the grass with the muzzle away from Chertopkhanov, and went up to him.

“Why, my dear, what’s all the fuss about? Don’t you know us gypsy girls? It’s our way, it’s how we are. Once the longing to be off comes over us, and calls our hearts away to somewhere else far off, how can we stay where we are? Remember your Masha—you won’t find another friend like her—and I, too, I won’t forget you, my falcon; but our life together is over!”

“I loved you, Masha,” mumbled Chertopkhanov into his fingers, with which he was clutching his face.

“And I loved you, Pantelei Eremeich, my friend.”

“I loved you, I still love you to distraction—and when I think now that here you are, for nothing at all, without rhyme or reason, chucking me, and starting to wander about the world—well, it strikes me that if I wasn’t a poor wretch of a beggar you wouldn’t leave me.”

At these words Masha simply chuckled.

“And you used to tell me I had no thought for silver,” she said, and with a sweep of her arm she hit Chertopkhanov on the shoulder.

He jumped to his feet.

“Well, at any rate take some money from me—otherwise how will you manage, without a farthing? But, best of all: kill me! I tell you plainly, kill me once and for all!”

Masha again shook her head. “Kill you? What do they send people to Siberia for, my dear?”

Chertopkhanov shuddered. “So it’s just because of this, for fear of punishment that you . . .”

He collapsed again on the grass. Masha stood over him in silence. “I’m sorry for you, Pantelei Eremeich,” she said with a sigh; “you’re a good man . . . but there’s nothing for it. Goodbye!”

She turned away and took two steps. Darkness had fallen and the shadows of night were welling up on every side. Chertopkhanov got up nimbly and seized Masha from behind by both elbows.

“So you’re off, you snake? To Yaff’s!”

“Good-bye!” repeated Masha sharply and with emphasis, and she broke loose and went on her way.

Chertopkhanov looked after her, ran over to the spot where the pistol lay, picked it up, aimed, fired . . . but, before pressing the trigger, he raised his hand: the bullet hummed over Masha’s head. She looked at him over her shoulder as she went, and continued on her way with a waddling motion, as if to mock him.

He covered his face—and set off at a run . . .

But he had not run as much as fifty paces, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the spot. A familiar, a too familiar voice floated to his ears. Masha was singing. “Days of youth so charming,” she sang; and every note was magnified in the evening air, in a plaintive, sultry way. Chertopkhanov listened with his head on one side. The voice went farther and farther into the distance; now it faded, now it came floating back again, hardly perceptible, but still burning . . .

She’s doing it to spite me, thought Chertopkhanov; but the same moment he groaned: “Oh, no! She’s saying good-bye to me for ever”—and he burst into floods of tears.

The following day he turned up at the residence of Mr. Yaff, who, like a true man of the world, disliked country solitude, and had settled in the nearest town, “nearer to the ladies,” as he expressed it. Chertopkhanov did not find Yaff at home: the footman said that he had left the day before for Moscow.

“That’s it!” exclaimed Chertopkhanov furiously. “They had a plot; she’s run off with him . . . but just wait!”

He forced his way into the young captain’s study, despite the opposition of the footman. In the study, over the sofa, hung an oil portrait of the master in Lancer uniform. “So that’s where you are, you monkey without a tail!” thundered Chertopkhanov, jumping on to the sofa—and he struck his fist against the stretched canvas and burst a great hole in it.

“Tell your good-for-nothing master,” he said to the footman, “that, failing his own odious face, Mr. Chertopkhanov, gentleman, has disfigured the painted version of it; and that if he desires satisfaction from me, he knows where to find Mr. Chertopkhanov, gentleman! Otherwise I’ll find him myself! I’ll find the dirty monkey if I have to go to the bottom of the sea!”

With these words, Chertopkhanov jumped off the sofa and solemnly took his departure.

But Captain Yaff demanded no satisfaction from him—he never even met him—and Chertopkhanov didn’t think it worth searching for his enemy, so nothing happened between them. Soon afterwards Masha herself vanished without trace. Chertopkhanov started drinking; but in time he “came round again.”

Here, however, his second disaster overtook him.

II

That is to say, his bosom friend Tikhon Ivanich Nedopyuskin died. Some two years before his death, his health had started to fail; he began suffering from asthma, kept dropping off to sleep and, on waking up, couldn’t at once recover his senses. The local doctor asserted that these attacks of his were “little strokes.” During the three days preceding Masha’s departure, the three days in which she got “bored,” Nedopyuskin had been lying at home at Besselendeyevka: he had caught a bad chill. The effect on him of Masha’s action was all the more unexpected: it was almost more profound than on Chertopkhanov himself. In keeping with his gentle, timid disposition, he showed nothing except the tenderest sympathy with his friend and a certain painful incomprehension, but something had burst and sagged inside him. “She has stolen my soul away,” he whispered to himself, as he sat on his favorite oilskin sofa and twined his fingers round each other. Even when Chertopkhanov recovered, Nedopyuskin didn’t—and went on feeling that he was “empty inside.” “Just here,” he would say, pointing at the middle of his chest, above the stomach.

In this way he dragged on until winter. At the first frosts, his asthma got better, but, against this, he had what was no longer a little stroke, but a real proper one. He did not lose consciousness at once; he could still recognize Chertopkhanov, and even, in answer to the despairing exclamation of his friend: “How is this, Tisha, that you’re leaving me, without my permission, just as bad as Masha?” he stammered: “But, Pa . . . lei E . . . E . . . ich, I’ve al . . . ays o . . . eyed you.” Yet this did not prevent him from dying the same day, without waiting for the local doctor, who, at the sight of his cold corpse, had nothing left to do but sadly admit the transitoriness of earthly things and ask for “a drop of vodka with a piece of smoked sturgeon.” Tikhon Ivanich left his property, as was only to be expected, to his revered benefactor and magnanimous protector, Pantelei Eremeich Chertopkhanov. But his revered benefactor did not derive much advantage from this, since it was quickly sold by auction—chiefly to cover the expenses of his funerary monument, a statue which Chertopkhanov (his father’s strain coming out in him!) had the idea of erecting over his friend’s ashes. This statue, which was supposed to represent an angel in prayer, he had ordered from Moscow, but the contractor who had been recommended to him, calculating that but few experts on sculpture are to be met in the provinces, sent him, instead of an angel, a goddess Flora which had for many years adorned one of those neglected parks in the neighborhood of Moscow which date back to the time of Catherine the Great—this statue, which incidentally was very elegant, in the rococo manner, with chubby hands, fluffy curls, a garland of roses hung round its bare breast, and a curved waist, having co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction by Max Egremont
• Preface by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Khor and Kalinich
• Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife
• Raspberry Water
• The Country Doctor
• My Neighbor Radilov
• Ovsyanikov the Freeholder
• Lgov
• Bezhin Meadow
• Kasyan from Fair Springs
• The Bailiff
• The Estate Office
• The Bear
• Two Landowners
• Lebedyan
• Tatyana Borisovna and Her Nephew
• Death
• The Singers
• Pyotr Petrovich Karataev
• The Rendezvous
• Prince Hamlet of Shchigrovo
• Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin
• The End of Chertopkhanov
• The Live Relic
• The Knocking
• Forest and Steppe
• About the Author
• Ecco Art of the Story
• Copyright
• About the Publisher