A Sportsman's Notebook - (Everyman's Library Classics) by Ivan Turgenev (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Presented here in a beautiful hardcover edition, 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 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 fatalistic submission of the tyrannized against a backdrop of the sublime and pitiless terrain of rural Russia.

These beautifully embellished, evocative stories were not only universally popular with the reading public when they were published 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. With an introduction by Max Egremont, this version was translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman's Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Review Quotes

"The first of Turgenev's masterpieces...A Sportman's Notebook conveys the vastness and beauty of rural Russia. It shows also the eccentricity, cruelty and nobility of many of its inhabitants...[Turgenev] was a careful writer, alive to each nuance of language and subtlety of style." --from the introduction by Max Egremont

About the Author

IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother. After his family moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered Petersburg University where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and, convinced that Europe contained the source of real knowledge, went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a young Spanish singer, who influenced the rest of his life; he followed her on her singing tours in Europe and spent long periods in the French house of herself and her husband, both of whom accepted him as a family friend. He sent his daughter by a sempstress to be brought up among the Viardot children. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad, and he became the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe; he was a well-known figure in Parisian literary circles, where his friends included Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and an honorary degree was conferred on him at Oxford. His series of six novels reflect a period of Russian life from 1830s to the 1870s: they are Rudin (1855), A House of Gentlefolk (1858), On the Eve (1859; a Penguin Classic), Fathers and Sons (1861), Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1876). He also wrote plays, which include the comedy A Month in the Country; short stories and Sketches from a Hunter's Album; and literary essays and memoirs. He died in Paris in 1883 after being ill for a year, and was buried in Russia.