Penguins on Parade: Sketches from a Hunter’s Album!

Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen in the past here at Stevereads, are just clear-cut improvements over earlier versions. One obvious example comes from 1990, the Richard Freeborn updated edition of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, the book that first made the literary reputation of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, whose first collection of these little sketches of Russian serf life was published in 1852 and quickly led to his exile to his country estate of Spasskoye. Penguin Classics added an English-language translation of the work to its list in 1967, but that edition was lacking several of the sketches and all of the sketch-fragments that can be found in Turgenev’s papers. Freeborn’s 1990 edition is complete, and his Introduction is very good, analyzing tale by tale these “occasional pieces, experiments in a particular kind of portraiture, tracts for the times cast in the mould of literature, trial sketches for his future work as a novelist.”

Turgenev came from a somewhat poor but noble background, and his championing of the downtrodden peasants was always more inadvertent (and opportunistic) than it was devotional, which Freeborn sees quite clearly and never lets his readers forget:

The fact that most of the Sketches are offered as brief, summery [sic] episodes tends to set in relief the ephemeral, not so say fleeting, manner of Turgenev’s encounter with the peasants and to make of them creations of a particular moment, with little identity beyond a nickname; their patronymics, like their parentage, have been obliterated in the anonymity of their servile condition. The framework of the peasant encounters, then, tends to objectivize and simultaneously to distance. It is a distancing, of course, which usually has the effect of making the encounter doubly significant, as though a lyric poem had been born of an anecdote, a work of art from a snapshot. But the difference, let it not be forgotten, is really due to ignorance.

Re-encountering these “sketches” puts you right in the minds of all those original readers who found in these pages the revelation of a sharp, clear new major talent. The natural world is vividly, lovingly invoked throughout – the narrators are always in motion, always making for the trees at sunset, with greenery and breezes coloring every quiet moment. Freeborn’s translation efforts are superb in catching the happy, fast-paced grades of shading Turgenev had already mastered when he wrote these sketches.

The end notes are a bit more problematic – they’re oddly spotty. The final line of the story “Chertopkhanov and Nedopyushkin,” for instance, is “It was late in the evening when I left Unsleepy Hollow.” But even though Freeman uses the term “Unsleepy Hollow” throughout the story, he includes no note about it, no help for readers who might be wondering if the translation is literal, and if so, just what familiarity Turgenev had with Washington Irving’s writing. The notes are like that; they tend to make you wish they were either five times as long or not there at all.

But the end notes can be ignored, as God intended all end notes to be. The real pleasure here is of course the translation itself, a jewel to be added to Penguin’s Russian library.