"Notes of a hunter" Turgenev: summary of the collection

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Today, any educated person is familiar with Turgenev's collection of stories and essays "Notes of a Hunter". A brief summary of them, however, each states in his own way. One reader likes the deep folk wisdom embedded in Chora and Kalinich more; to another, fleeting watercolor strokes of Bezhinoy Meadow; the third fails to isolate something, strung like beads, story after story, trying to capture the essence of each. In this article we will try to consider what idea the book "Notes of a Hunter" expresses. Turgenev as a writer is multidimensional, so please do not take the conclusions of the article as the only possible opinion, but, after reading the book, make your own verdict. The Hunter's Notes is one of those classics that should be re-read to catch new nuances.

Social ideas of the piece

Remember what socialideas contain Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. The summary of the collection can be expressed in one phrase: a general picture of the life of the Russian people, presented with the help of various mini-plots. Serfdom became a clear brake on the further development of Russia. Moreover, the understanding of what constitutes the Russian peasantry served as the basis for the preservation of this form of legalized slavery. "For slavery" openly and actively spoke two political currents. First, we are talking about the populist position of the big bourgeoisie (at the same time, the official point of view of the authorities). She translated the question into the plane of psychology, ranting about the fact that the landowners are fathers, and the peasants are children. Accordingly, the lack of rights of the peasants was "hidden" by the harmony of relations. The second point of view was expressed by the so-called Narodniks. They blamed any reforms in Russia, starting from the time of Peter I, idealizing pre-Petrine, boyar Russia. Both views were false, it was pure discourse, diverting public attention from the essence of the issue.

Summary

It would seem that the lyricist-Turgenev wrote "Notes of a Hunter". The brief content of the book, based on the title, should be quite banal: the impressions of an Oryol landowner, a nature lover who is fond of hunting. What is easier? Went hunting, hung up the gun on a nail. He took a pen and wrote another "brief report". But no! The work, consisting of 25 seemingly completely different parts, turned out to be monolithic, giving a vivid and truthful reflection of the Russian hinterland of the middle of the 19th century. This is one of the brightest and most imaginative books about peasant Russia. It is written so masterfully that later descendants will call Turgenev's syllable "poems in prose."

The story "Khor and Kalinich" tells about two serf friends from a peasant environment. The value is that the characters are real. The village of Khorevka in the Ulyanovsk district of the Kaluga region is an overgrown farm of Khorya. Both of them are not "downtrodden" peasants, both are bright personalities, intellect - exceeding the level of their "master", the landowner Polutykin. Khor is a business executive, organizer and hard worker. He and his six sons with their families jointly run a strong, profitable peasant economy. At the same time, Khor remains in the status of a serf, evading Polutykin's proposals - to redeem himself, considering it an indecent waste of money and regularly paying the doubled quitrent. Kalinich is a man of high spirituality and closeness to nature. He is Polutykin's first assistant in hunting games. But this is not the main thing in it. He understands nature. To pacify an unbroken horse, to speak pain, to calm agitated bees - this is what Kalinich is strong in. It is this story that refutes the view of the bourgeois and populists on the Russian peasantry in Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. The summary of "Khorya and Kalinych" argues, in contrast to the populists, that the Russian people are not afraid of change, but go for them if they see practical meaning in this. The entire content of the story contradicts the bourgeois position about the "landlord fathers": both peasants are much smarter, deeper and more interesting than their master, Polutykin.

The story "Bezhin Meadow" introduces us, together with the resting landowner-hunter, hiding in the steppe, into the boyish freemen. Children graze horses at night, rest by the fire, talk. In their mouths, fiction is confused with reality, the beauty of the steppe is confused with the perception of life. An artist of the word, Turgenev depicts a real, fleeting and unimagined picture. Everyone, reading the story, finds in it analogies with their childhood, carried away into the distance, like horses across the steppe.

Limited to the length of the article, we can only mention a few other stories. Bitterness and pain sound in the mouths of 50-year-old Vlas, who lost his son, an assistant in the household (“Cowberry Water”). The master, who was not distinguished by the breadth of his soul, not only did not sympathize with him, but also refused to lower the quitrent, and Vlas' position became generally hopeless. In the story "Yermolai and the Miller's Woman" we learn about the plight of the miller's wife Arina, whose love for the servant Petrushka was literally "trampled" by the angry landowner Zverkov. He shaved the pregnant servants, dressed them in rags and sent them to the village. The writer's anxiety is filled with the story "Knocks". The title of the story is both literal and figurative. They say that if you press your ear to the ground in the steppe, you can hear the horsemen approaching or receding. The landowner-hunter, riding on a tarantass to Tula for shot with the coachman Filofey, hears such a sound. Soon they were overtaken, blocking the road, by a cart drawn by a troika. A tall, strong man drove the cart, there were six other men with him, all drunk. They asked for money. Received and left. The meeting with the robbers turned out to be a success for the landowner, butsoon, as the story testifies, a merchant was killed under similar circumstances in the steppe.

Each of the 25 stories brings its own nuance, shade to the overall canvas of the picture of the folk life of "The Hunter's Notes". The picture is disturbing. Behind the beauty of nature and Russian characters, obvious glaring social contradictions are visible. The whole point of the collection boils down to the urgent need for the broadest state reforms for the entire country.

Conclusion

Oddly enough, not fiery revolutionaries, but the lyricist Turgenev turned this question, as the people say, "from head to foot." The book was relevant, readers loved it. Turgenev himself recalls the episode when young raznochintsy who met him at the railway station expressed their gratitude from all over Russia by bowing from the waist.

Immediately after writing it, Chernyshevsky and Herzen took it to the category of classics. It is difficult to overestimate the role played in the abolition of serfdom by Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. Their summary was familiar to many people, but historians testify that this book was one of the favorites of Emperor Alexander II, the Liberator.