In the Peasant's Place: Social Problems and Narrative Practice in Turgenev's Notes from a Hunter

Abstract

This article is concerned with the aesthetic and social tensions of the countryside in Ivan Turgenev's Notes from a Hunter (Zapiski okhotnika, 1847–52) as a site where two temporalities–history and immediacy–collide, producing shifts in narrative perspective and descriptive style. Behind these technical changes lie greater intellectual developments, refracting the nationalist discourses of the 1840s and the complex demands they produced for literature. Envisioned as what I call “the place of the peasant,” the countryside represents an ideal that combines aesthetic, social, and nationalist elements, accommodating the “here-and-now” as well as the socio-historical structures that make it readable. Here, identity is contiguous with the environment, transparent to a sensitive observer, and supportive of a descriptive style that favors details in and of themselves. Building on scholarship that treats Notes from a Hunter as a laboratory for new narrative forms, I interpret social themes behind a search for a narrative perspective that modulates authorial distance, the emergence of character from type, and an increasingly selective descriptive style. Approaching the question of social tensions in Notes from a Hunter from a literary-historical perspective, I also reconsider such topics as the ironization of gentry ignorance. On my account, at stake in the formulation of a new realist aesthetics in Notes from a Hunter is an essentialization of literature as a discourse closely associated with a mystique of peasant life and, by extension, a valorization of “the concrete” as a bulwark against history, otherness, self-confrontation, and preceding literary styles. Through analyses of several stories of Notes from a Hunter against the background of theories of nationalism and histories of description and narration, I posit mutually illuminating connections between social and literary forms, from visions of character as socially displaced and narrative perspective as socially stable to Russian realism itself as a movement dependent on an ambiguous contrast with a peasant other.