Nature and Nidification

This chapter traces Ivan Turgenev's venatically informed exploitation of natural elements in the fiction he created during the ten years that followed his intimate involvement with Sergei Aksakov's work: nature illuminates the aspiration, fear, victimization, and frustrated love that suffuse these texts. The story “Journey to the Forest-Belt” and novels Rudin and A Gentry Nest are the chief focus of the chapter. The chapter describes “Journey to the Forest-Belt,” one of Turgenev's most powerful explorations of the human interaction with the natural environment, as a transitional work that looked back at the last-written Notes of a Hunter stories and forward to his post-Aksakovian techniques. It discusses the three meanings of the koromyslo as a literary device: first as dragonflies, second as the way females bend the abdomen when males approach if the females are not ready to mate, and third as the balance beam of a traditional beam scale.

Life at the Lek

This chapter tackles the major works that brought Ivan Turgenev's most fertile period to a close: On the Eve, First Love, and Fathers and Children. It gives a detailed summary of the three novels, and discusses the hunter's conception of nesting and mating which dominates these final two chapters. The chapter investigates zoological, botanical, and celestial motifs as well as Turgenev's deft use of hunting lore, history, language, music, religion, philosophy, classical mythology, and folk culture to enrich his complex narratives. For Turgenev, mating is a moment when opposed elements come together, when the precise fulcrum of nature's balance is readily detectable, and the suitability of a potential mate is exposed.

Conclusion

This final chapter, the conclusion, reflects on the treatment of nature and hunting themes in the last two decades of Ivan Turgenev's life, when, though his passion for the chase persisted, palpable doubts about its freshness and moral legitimacy appeared with greater force and frequency. In this late period, Turgenev gravitated toward the paranormal in his short stories. His last two novels, Smoke and Virgin Soil, continue to use nature as a touchstone in ideologically charged settings, though Virgin Soil does so with considerably more finesse. The chapter explains that the appendices provide translations of four source documents vital to any understanding of Turgenev's nature philosophy: a chronology of his references to nature's indifference, his two reviews of Sergei Aksakov's hunting treatise, and his codified precepts for hunters and their dogs.

“A Different Kind of Game”

This chapter reviews the rise of Russian hunting literature and surveys Turgenev's own venatic writing. It mentions the works of Reutt, Odesskaia, Osnovskii, and Vaksel. It talks about Turgenev's first work, “Fifty Flaws.” It also mentions his series of poems in prose he classified as “Senilia.” The remainder of the chapter is devoted to Notes of a Hunter, which, it proposes, shares key structural features with hunting manuals. It discusses its reception among other hunter writers. The interplay of ecotropic and anthropotropic modes in this extraordinarily influential cycle of short stories reinforces moral opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power (proizvol).

The Gun before the Lyre

This chapter explores the three most prevalent kinds of sport hunting pursued in nineteenth-century Russia — coursing, hounding, shooting — and suggests that their essential differences pointed to very distinct modes of interacting with nature. Illustrative examples of Ivan Turgenev's zealous devotion to shooting are taken from memoir accounts of his actual hunting praxis. The chapter discusses Turgenev's hunting experience and proclivities. Hunting became one of the most important aspects of Turgenev's existence, even an obsession. The chapter mentions Turgenev's close friend Dmitrii Iakovlevich Kolbasin's memoir, which gives us a glimpse of Turgenev as a hunting tutor. It also discusses Turgenev's afield in memoirs and letters.

Catching Nature by the Tail

This chapter discusses the roots of Ivan Turgenev's nature philosophy. It discusses how Turgenev was able to assimilate a number of ideas from Goethe's and Schelling's thoughts on the natural world that became central figurations in Turgenev's own nature writing. The chapter describes Turgenev's early grounding in German Romantic nature philosophy and traces the development of his own conception of nature's indifference in relation to Alexander Herzen's thought on the subject. It then discusses Turgenev's ideal as a hunter writer, and how nature served as a guide and a model for him. The chapter proposes and explains the concepts of venatic equipoise, ecotropism, and anthropotropism as tools for analyzing Turgenev as a nature writer.

Introduction

This chapter talks about Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev who is known for his renowned ability to describe the natural world. It discusses the three basic, interconnected Russian terms for “nature”: natura, estestvo, and priroda. Natura is the “trait, characteristic, attribute, feature; way of life, that which is natural or inborn.” Estestvo — derived from the Russian word for “is” (est') — meant “all that is; priroda, natura and its order or laws; essence.” Priroda, the dominant term today and for Turgenev, refers to the kind of “nature” that we would readily associate in English with a “nature writer.” In his fiction and nonfiction, Turgenev employed priroda and its forms frequently. The chapter discusses Turgenev's arrest and exile to his country estate in the spring of 1852 that steeped Turgenev in hunting and Aksakovian nature writing.

Thinking Oneself into Nature

This chapter examines Ivan Turgenev's personal and literary encounter with Sergei Aksakov, focusing on the philosophical and aesthetic implications of his second review of Aksakov's classic hunting treatise, then turns to Turgenev's story “The Inn” as an unyielding embodiment of the principles set forth in the review. For Turgenev, Aksakov represented an admirable model of unselfconscious, ecotropic nature description that was nonetheless difficult for him to follow. The chapter also discusses the governing contrast for Turgenev that is not typically center versus periphery, but who is subordinated versus who subordinates. It also talks about Turgenev's scorn for the anthropotropic mode and his most direct and profound observations about the natural world.