The Hunting Sketches Volume 1: My Neighbour Radilov and Other Stories

Ivan Turgenev

Description

The first major writing by Turgenev that gained him recognition. The stories in this collection were written based on Turgenev’s own observations while hunting at his mothers’ estate. This work exposed many injustices of serfdom and led to Turgenev’s house arrest and eventual abolishment of serfdom in Russia. A fine example of realist tradition in Russian literature.

Informations

• Publié par: Interactive Media
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907832062
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev
My Neighbour Radilov and Other Stories
New Edition
Published by Sovereign Classic
This Edition
First published in 2011
Copyright © 2011 Sovereign
All Rights Reserved.
Contents
MY NEIGHBOUR RADILOV
THE PEASANT PROPRIETOR OVSYANIKOV
MY NEIGHBOUR RADILOV
For the autumn, woodcocks often take refuge in old gardens of lime- trees. There are a good many such gardens among us, in the province of Orel. Our forefathers, when they selected a place for habitation, invariably marked out two acres of good ground for a fruit-garden, with avenues of lime-trees. Within the last fifty, or seventy years at most, these mansions - ‘noblemen’s nests,’ as they call them - have gradually disappeared off the face of the earth; the houses are falling to pieces, or have been sold for the building materials; the stone outhouses have become piles of rubbish; the apple-trees are dead and turned into firewood, the hedges and fences are pulled up. Only the lime-trees grow in all their glory as before, and with ploughed fields all round them, tell a tale to this light-hearted generation of ‘our fathers and brothers who have lived before us.’
A magnificent tree is such an old lime-tree.... Even the merciless axe of the Russian peasant spares it. Its leaves are small, its powerful limbs spread wide in all directions; there is perpetual shade under them.
Once, as I was wandering about the fields after partridges with Yermolaï, I saw some way off a deserted garden, and turned into it. I had hardly crossed its borders when a snipe rose up out of a bush with a clatter. I fired my gun, and at the same instant, a few paces from me, I heard a shriek; the frightened face of a young girl peeped out for a second from behind the trees, and instantly disappeared. Yermolaï ran up to me: ‘Why are you shooting here? there is a landowner living here.’
Before I had time to answer him, before my dog had had time to bring me, with dignified importance, the bird I had shot, swift footsteps were heard, and a tall man with moustaches came out of the thicket and stopped, with an air of displeasure, before me. I made my apologies as best I could, gave him my name, and offered him the bird that had been killed on his domains.
‘Very well,’ he said to me with a smile; ‘I will take your game, but only on one condition: that you will stay and dine with us.’
I must confess I was not greatly delighted at his proposition, but it was impossible to refuse.
‘I am a landowner here, and your neighbour, Radilov; perhaps you have heard of me?’ continued my new acquaintance; ‘to-day is Sunday, and we shall be sure to have a decent dinner, otherwise I would not have invited you.’
I made such a reply as one does make in such circumstances, and turned to follow him. A little path that had lately been cleared soon led us out of the grove of lime-trees; we came into the kitchen-garden. Between the old apple-trees and gooseberry bushes were rows of curly whitish-green cabbages; the hop twined its tendrils round high poles; there were thick ranks of brown twigs tangled over with dried peas; large flat pumpkins seemed rolling on the ground; cucumbers showed yellow under their dusty angular leaves; tall nettles were waving along the hedge; in two or three places grew clumps of tartar honeysuckle, elder, and wild rose - the remnants of former flower-beds. Near a small fish-pond, full of reddish and slimy water, we saw the well, surrounded by puddles. Ducks were busily splashing and waddling about these puddles; a dog blinking and twitching in every limb was gnawing a bone in the meadow, where a piebald cow was lazily chewing the grass, from time to time flicking its tail over its lean back. The little path turned to one side; from behind thick willows and birches we caught sight of a little grey old house, with a boarded roof and a winding flight of steps. Radilov stopped short.
‘But,’ he said, with a good-humoured and direct look in my face,’ on second thoughts ... perhaps you don’t care to come and see me, after all.... In that case - ‘
I did not allow him to finish, but assured him that, on the contrary, it would be a great pleasure to me to dine with him.
‘Well, you know best.’
We went into the house. A young man in a long coat of stout blue cloth met us on the steps. Radilov at once told him to bring Yermolaï some vodka; my huntsman made a respectful bow to the back of the munificent host. From the hall, which was decorated with various parti-coloured pictures and check curtains, we went into a small room - Radilov’s study. I took off my hunting accoutrements, and put my gun in a corner; the young man in the long-skirted coat busily brushed me down.
‘Well, now, let us go into the drawing-room.’ said Radilov cordially. ‘I will make you acquainted with my mother.’
I walked after him. In the drawing-room, in the sofa in the centre of the room, was sitting an old lady of medium height, in a cinnamon- coloured dress and a white cap, with a thinnish, kind old face, and a timid, mournful expression.
‘Here, mother, let me introduce to you our neighbour....’
The old lady got up and made me a bow, not letting go out of her withered hands a fat worsted reticule that looked like a sack.
‘Have you been long in our neighbourhood?’ she asked, in a weak and gentle voice, blinking her eyes.
‘No, not long.’
‘Do you intend to remain here long?’
‘Till the winter, I think.’
The old lady said no more.
‘And here,’ interposed Radilov, indicating to me a tall and thin man, whom I had not noticed on entering the drawing-room, ‘is Fyodor Miheitch. ... Come, Fedya, give the visitor a specimen of your art. Why have you hidden yourself away in that corner?’
Fyodor Miheitch got up at once from his chair, fetched a wretched little fiddle from the window, took the bow - not by the end, as is usual, but by the middle - put the fiddle to his chest, shut his eyes, and fell to dancing, singing a song, and scraping on the strings. He looked about seventy; a thin nankin overcoat flapped pathetically about his dry and bony limbs. He danced, at times skipping boldly, and then dropping his little bald head with his scraggy neck stretched out as if he were dying, stamping his feet on the ground, and sometimes bending his knees with obvious difficulty. A voice cracked with age came from his toothless mouth.
Radilov must have guessed from the expression of my face that Fedya’s ‘art’ did not give me much pleasure.