the 'hunter in terror of hunters': a cynegetic reading of

ARTICLES

THE "HUNTER IN TERROR OF HUNTERS": A CYNEGETIC READING OF TURGENEV'S FATHERS AND CHILDREN

Thomas P. Hodge, Wellesley College

Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atro cious confluence. Hunting submerges man delib erately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, tran scendent, in the laws of Nature.

-Ortega y Gasset 112

By the 1840s, the Russian literary scene- like French and English writing was inundated by sporting literature (Alekseev 214-16, Odesskaia 240-43). While Ivan Turgenev's entry into the world of prose fiction with the stories that became Notes of a Hunter [Zapiski okhotnika] can readily be viewed as part of this trend, I propose that hunting and its codes were so deeply ingrained in Tur genev's creative personality that important aspects of his later works too, even Fathers and Children [Ottsy i deti], were suffused with the terminology, tech niques, and moral implications of field sport as it was practiced by the Russian gentry. If we approach Turgenev through the work of Sergei Aksakov and other contemporaneous sporting writers, I suggest, we find fresh intertextual meaning in this most canonical Russian author's most widely read texts.

My goal here is to describe the sporting world of nineteenth-century Rus sia and demonstrate the profundity of Turgenev's immersion in it; to discuss how this expertise shaped his view of the natural world and understanding of classical mythology; and finally to propose a new reading of Bazarov's fate in Fathers and Children based on cynegetic elements in that novel -by this I

mean images of and references to the hunter's pursuit of game with the assis tance of dogs. The etymology and application of the Russian term for hunting [okhota]

depart dramatically from most West European linguistic practice. In French, chasse emphasizes pursuit, as does the English term chase, Italian caccia,

SEEJ, Vol. 51, No. 3 (2007): p. 453-p. 473 453

454 Slavic and East European Journal

Spanish caza, all of which stress the seeking of game, though they ultimately derive from Latin capere [to take, to seize]. English hunt descends from terms meaning "to take," "to capture." Russian okhota, however, is based on the same root from which we have khotet' [to want] -not to mention pokhot' [lust] - and it denotes desire, keenness to do something, and can be applied to numerous everyday activities or hobbies that have nothing to do with the cap ture or killing of animals (Durkin 72-73).1 Inherent in the Russian conception of hunting, therefore, is a connotation of its source within the personality of the hunter rather than in the nature of his or her physical activity. Etymolog ically, at least, okhota is a feeling, not a practice. This conceptual distinction aside, Russian sport-hunters in the nineteenth

century used the techniques of English, French and German enthusiasts and essentially adhered to the same distinctions among various forms of the hunt by the end of the eighteenth century: hawking, netting, shooting, and cours ing (Munsche 32).2 With few exceptions, members of the Russian nobility limited themselves to these last two activities, both of which depended en tirely on the participation of well-trained dogs and rested upon a generally recognized code of what constituted "sporting" behavior.3 The two principal forms of hunting embraced by the gentry and later the middle class were based on two very different tactics.

Because it did not depend on the use of firearms, coursing [psovaia okhota, gon'ba] was by far the older form, dating back at least to ancient Egypt, where gazelles were chased by ancestors of the modem greyhound. Coursing consisted of releasing hounds [gonchie sobaki] that relied on their keen eye sight (gazehounds) or keen sense of smell to run down game [dich'] while hunters [okhotniki], either mounted or on foot, attempted to catch up while the hounds held the game animal at bay, pinned it to the ground, or less de sirably -killed it. If this last eventuality was avoided, hunters could arrive on the scene and kill their prey at leisure with spears or arrows (the practice up through the Middle Ages), or a gun (the practice from the sixteenth century onward).4 The most commonly pursued animals in Russian hound-hunting were wolves, bears, deer and hares.

1. It is probable that the basic German term for "hunt," Jagd, is also derived from an Indo

European root that can mean both "to chase" and "to wish for"; see Porkorny. 2. The ancient hunting practices I will refer to throughout this essay are gathered chiefly from

two works: Hull and Anderson. A late-eighteenth-century, early-nineteenth-century form of Rus

sian hawking is described at length by S. T. Aksakov in "Okhota s iastrebom za perepelkami," in

his Rasskazy i vospominaniia okhotnika o raznykh okhotakh in Aksakov 1956, 4: 480-503.

3. The norms of sport-hunting made it harder to kill and emphasized the means of killing;

subsistence-hunting, in which the end is all-important, sought to make the kill as easy as possi ble (MacKenzie 10).

4. The most famous breed of Russian dog, the Russian wolfhound or borzoi [borzaia sobaka], was a gazehound bred expressly to course wolves; a famous literary example of such sport is fur

nished by the wolf-hunt in Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace (I, Vol. 2, Part 4, Chapters 3-5).

The "Hunter in Terror of Hunters" 455

For the bagging of birds, and sometimes hares, an entirely different and much more recently developed method was necessary: shooting, also known in English as fowling or field sport [ruzheinaia okhota, polevaia okhota]. This form of hunting, which originated in sixteenth-century Europe, depends on the use of a smooth-bore firearm designed to propel a large number of pellets. Be fore firing, hunters must be relatively close to their prey- Turgenev in 1876 considered one hundred paces a maximum5 -and therefore stalking is essen tial. As an aid in this stealthy pursuit, dogs trained to listen for, sniff out, and communicate the presence of game -field dogs [legavye sobaki] - are indis pensable (PSS (Soch.) 10: 274). When such dogs detected hidden quarry, they would stop and take up a set [stoika] -hence the French chiens d'arret [stop ping-dogs] -which communicated the location of the intended victim. In his Notes of an Orenburg-Province Hunter [1852], Sergei Aksakov vividly de scribed a dog's behavior in taking up a set:

Only dedicated sportsmen can appreciate all the charm of the scene when a dog, pausing fre quently, finally goes right up to a sitting woodcock, raises its paw and stands trembling as in a fever, its eager eyes spellbound and seeming to turn green, fixed to the spot where the bird is sitting. It stands as if graven in stone, rooted to the spot, as sportsmen say. (1998, 277)

In English parlance, as Turgenev explained it to Russian readers in 1852, short-haired dogs who "set" by stretching forward and raising their heads to ward the game were called pointers; long-haired dogs who "set" by sitting or lying down were called setters (PSS (Soch.) 4: 510-11).6 Leonid Sabaneev, the most accomplished late-nineteenth-century authority on Russian field sport, asserted in the mid- 1 890s that Turgenev owned some of the first point ers in Russia (Sabaneev 427, 462). Unlike coursing, field sport demanded an extraordinarily close relationship

between a highly skilled hunter and an exceptionally intelligent dog, a dog who had to understand numerous complex verbal commands-in mid-nine teenth-century Russia, these commands were given in French-under often rugged and trying circumstances.7 Aksakov held that the field dog completed the hunter and furnished the essence of fowling:

5. Turgenev, "Piat'desiat nedostatkov ruzheinogo okhotnika i piat'desiat nedostatkov legavoi sobaki" PSS (Soch.) \0: 274.

6. Turgenev, "Zapiski ruzheinogo okhotnika Orenburgskoi gubernii. S. A?va. Moskva.

1852 (Pis'mo k odnomu iz izdatelei Sovremennika)." 1. The basic commands were ? terre! [down], Pille! [seize], Apporte! [fetch], Donne! [give],

Derri?re! [heel], Cherche! [seek], Tourne! [turn]. In the late eighteenth century, German imper atives were employed; the fashion for French commands arose in the first third of the nineteenth

century. In 1852 Aksakov jokingly described the transition: "formerly in Russia broken German was used, and now Russians mangle French" (1956, 4: 161). Kevin Windle's translation of Ak

sakov's treatise (1998) omits the early chapters on hunting equipment and dogs. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.


Every hunter understands the need for a field dog: this is the life and soul of shooting [...] a hunter with a field-piece but without a dog is something deficient, incomplete [...] a dog's searching can be so expressive and clear that it's exactly as though it is speaking with the hunter [...]. A good dog has an unselfish and natural passion for seeking out game and will devote it self to this with selflessness; it will love its master warmly too and, unless forced to, will part with the hunter neither day nor night [...] (1956, 4: 160, 162)

Elzear Blaze, who, alongside Aksakov, was Turgenev's favorite hunting au thor, summed up the human-canine relationship by frequently citing the French hunting proverb, "A good dog makes a good hunter, and a good hunter makes a good dog."8

In general, nineteenth-century Russian hunters, like their West European counterparts, preferred either shooting or coursing and tended not to engage in both; Lev Tolstoy was an exception. Aleksei Khomiakov was an enthusi astic breeder of borzois and an expert in coursing,9 while Nikolai Nekrasov, Afanasy Fet, and Turgenev devoted themselves to shooting. Of all these prominent literary hunters, only one - Turgenev- approached the passionate devotion to field sport for which his friend Sergei Aksakov, the patriarch of all modem Russian sporting literature, has long been famous. Hunting was without doubt one of the most important aspects of Tur

genev's existence; he called himself "a true hunter a hunter body and soul" (PSS (Soch.) 4: 509).10 The biographical and autobiographical evidence sug gests that Turgenev, the son of two serious hunters, was himself a hunter using a gun by age twelve -long before he was a writer (Shapochka 46, Tur genev PSS (Soch.) 10: 11 8). 1

As the vogue for hunting spread among European landowners in the 1 820s and 1830s, vivid written descriptions of their adventures in forest and field were soon to follow, first in England, then in France (Alekseev 214-15). Hunting sketches, as Margarita Odesskaia has demonstrated (240-42), began to turn up in Russian periodicals during the 1840s:

Hunting by that time had become not only the possession of the nobleman's estate, but also a part of spiritual culture [...] alongside the urban literature that was forming [...] there also took shape a gentry literature that cultivated the ideas of naturalness and closeness to nature, that idealized the peasant primordially connected to the earth and who embodied the principle of nature. Hunting, which imitates both a field of battle and a dramatic stage, was for the noble man not simply a game that provided an outlet for his natural passions, but also [...] placed him face to face with nature, returning him to a primordial sensation of the world's wholeness. When hunting, man communes with the cycles that are constantly being accomplished in nature [...]. Hunting provided the ability not to gaze upon the beauty of nature at a certain remove, but to participate in her life, feeling oneself to be part of the greater whole. (Odesskaia 243)

8. "Le bon chien fait le bon chasseur, le bon chasseur fait le bon chien" (Blaze, 1,331,339). 9. Khomiakov's zeal is reminisicent of the first of Gogol's seven famous zadory in Chapter

2 of Mertvye dushi: "one man's ardor applies to borzois" (Gogol 24). 10. See also Hodge 294.

11. Turgenev's autobiographical story "Perepelka."


Led by such writers as Kukolnik, Nekrasov, and Khomiakov, the first works of Russian hunting literature in the 1 840s seemed to betoken a bright future for the genre.12

It was at precisely this juncture that Turgenev, whose lifelong devotion to shooting put him in the perfect position to create venatic writing of superior quality, joined the fray. In 1846 he created his nine-poem cycle The Country side [Derevnia], which contains two hunting lyrics -"Before the Hunt" and "Summer Hunting" [Pered okhotoi; Na okhote- letom] -and by November of that year had completed "Khor and Kalinych"; both the poem cycle and the story appeared in the January 1847 issue of The Contemporary [Sovremen nik].13 The Countryside was the last poetry Turgenev would publish in his lifetime, while "Khor and Kalinych" famously became the first sketch in the collection of tales eventually known as Notes of a Hunter, based on the sub title ("From the notes of a hunter") given to "Khor and Kalinych" by Ivan Panaev when the story first appeared in The Contemporary (Alekseev 210-12).

It was not long before a friendship developed between Turgenev and Aksa kov, the two sporting writers whose work towered over that of Russia's other literary hunters. In January 1851, twenty months before his Notes of a Hunter would be published as a book, Turgenev visited Sergei Aksakov in Moscow and listened with great pleasure to a reading of the older man's manuscript of Notes of an Orenburg-Province Hunter, much to the delight of Aksakov, who had long admired Turgenev's own Notes (Nikitina 177). A year later, Turgenev expressed his impatience at the publication delays holding up Aksakov's hunt ing treatise and wrote to him that "writing a review of it would simply be a

12. One of the earliest Russian hunting sketches in this period was published by Nestor Kukol

nik in the inaugural issue of Zhurnal konnozavodstva i okhoty [The Journal of Horse Breeding and Hunting], a monthly that began publication in 1842 (Kukol'nik, Akopov 63). Nekrasov's "A

Landowner of Twenty-Three Souls," with its long passages on hunting dogs, appeared in May 1843 (see also scene 10 of Nekrasov's vaudeville "Peterburgskii rostovshchik" [Petersburg Mon

eylender], in which the character Rostomakhov, who believes that the dog is "nature's most won

drous creation, superior to man," sings a song on the glories and expenses of coursing with

hounds (Nekrasov, PSS 6: 154-55)). Khomiakov's tendentious 1845 article for The Muscovite

[Moskvitianin] entitled "Sport, Hunting" [Sport, okhota], is his translation from, and jingoistic

commentary on, hunting sketches published the previous year in an unspecified British journal. The mid-1840s also witnessed the creation of Russia's first lengthy monograph on hunting dogs,

Napoleon Reurt's two-volume Coursing with Hounds [Psovaia okhota], published in St. Peters

burg in 1846. That same year Sergei Aksakov completed the first edition of his Notes on Fishing

[Zapiski ob uzhen 'e ryby], and in October 1847 a Russian translation of Louis Viardot's memoirs

of his Russian hunting trips?organized in part by Turgenev four years earlier?appeared in The

Journal of Horse Breeding and Hunting (Odesskaia 241; Turgenev PSS (Pis'ma) 1: 202). 13. This was the first issue edited by Nekrasov, a fellow hunter who the following month

published in his newly acquired journal "Coursing with Hounds" [Psovaia okhota], a satiric

verse reply to Turgenev's "Before the Hunt"; Nekrasov took both his title and epigraph from

Reurt's 1846 treatise.


holiday for me" (PSS (Pis'ma) 2: 117).14 Aksakov's book appeared in March 1852, and Turgenev, exactly one week before his arrest in St. Peterburg for writing the Gogol obituary, published his first review of Aksakov's Notes of an Orenburg-Province Hunter in the April issue of The Contemporary. This no tice consists of a one-paragraph introduction to the Aksakov work, then eight long excerpts from it (each prefaced with a single sentence), capped off by a brief conclusion: "It is impossible to read this book without a kind of joyful, bright and complete feeling similar to those feelings that nature herself awak ens in us; we know of no higher praise than this" (PSS (Soch.) 4: 508). While in exile at his home estate of Spasskoe-Lutovinovo from 1852 to

1853, Turgenev immersed himself in the world of hunting and corresponded frequently with Aksakov. In August 1852 the book version of Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter was published. In the autumn of 1852, he finally completed his second, much fuller and more complex review of Aksakov's treatise; this review appeared, with certain passages removed by the censor, in the January 1853 issue of The Contemporary. In early March of that year, Aksakov out lined his plan to found and edit a hunting journal and invited Turgenev, along with Khomiakov and Yury Samarin, among others, to contribute; Turgenev eagerly accepted (Nikitina 231, 234).15 In mid-May 1853, Turgenev strolled along an aspen grove and vividly described his impressions in a letter to

Aksakov the next day; nearly a decade later, Turgenev would recycle this de scription almost verbatim for Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov's lyrical reverie in Chapter 11 of Fathers and Children (Nikitina 238).16 Two weeks later, Tur genev met Fet, who would become a hunting companion in both Russia and France over the next decade. During that same month, Turgenev entered into an epistolary discussion with his friend Lev Nikolaevich Vaksel of Aksakov's hunting treatise; Vaksel went on to write the standard nineteenth-century Rus sian hunting manual, A Pocket Guide for Beginning Hunters, first published in 1856 and going through four new, enlarged editions over the next two de cades.17 In July 1853, Turgenev went hunting for two weeks along the River Desna, in Russia's so-called "forest belt" [poles'e] with a peasant guide named Egor; initially Turgenev tried to work up his account of the experience as a

contribution to Aksakov's hunting journal, but eventually published it in 1857 as the fictionalized tale "A Journey into the Forest Belt" [Poezdka v poles'e], which contains some of Turgenev's most important commentary on the natu ral world.18 Aksakov's hunting journal failed to receive publication permission

14. Turgenev to Aksakov, 2 (14) February 1852, St. Petersburg. 15. Aksakov to Turgenev, 9 (21) March 1853, and Turgenev to Aksakov, 2 (14) April 1853.

16. Turgenev to Aksakov, 12, 16 (24, 28) May 1853.

17. The book was greatly expanded for its later editions, of which there were at least five

through 1898, and retitled Rukovodstvo dlia nachinaiushchikh okhotifsia [...]. 18. Note that Turgenev had included a footnote in his story "Pevtsy" [The Singers] from Za

piski okhotnika describing what a poles'e was and, in an early draft ofthat note, promising to

write further on that theme someday (PSS (Soch.) 3: 221).


from the censorship, the other authors apart from Turgenev reneged on their promises to contribute, and Aksakov converted the project into a one-volume miscellany, published in 1855, entitled A Sportsman's Stories and Memoirs on Various Kinds of Sport, with an AppendedArticle on Nightingales by I. S. Tur genev.19 Turgenev's contribution was actually his embellished transcription of a narrative related to him by his serf and longtime hunting guide, Afanasy Al ifanov, the prototype for the character Ermolai in the Notes of a Hunter stories. The failure of Sergei Aksakov's journalistic enterprise represents a crucial

turning point for hunting literature in Russia: it became clear that the genre had been abandoned by the luminaries and appropriated by the writers of manuals: "Having outlived its efflorescence in the 1840s-50s, the hunting tale [was] appropriated by dilettante writers who strove to conserve the genre" (Odesskaia 249). I suggest that Turgenev, who retained his zeal for sport to the end of his life, now for the most part submerged the thematic complex of hunting literature into his stories and novels, including Fathers and Children, and okhota permeated his fiction, most often at the level of sub text. Such is the legacy of what one Russian critic has recently described as the "Aksakov-Turgenev tradition" [aksakovsko-turgenevskaia traditsiia] (Kudel'ko 115-16). Nonetheless, the vagaries of the 1 860s behind him, Turgenev did produce

a few works in the 1870s and 1880s that were explicitly devoted to hunting themes and which are strikingly consistent with his early writing about field sport. The first of these works is "Pegase," written in Paris in December 1871 as a tribute to Turgenev's eponymous hunting dog, a beloved German shep herd-English setter cross who had accompanied the writer on some extraordi nary adventures in the field.20 A few years later, Turgenev codified his per sonal interpretation of the sporting strictures observed by noblemen-hunters in a little-known article entitled "A Hunter's Fifty Flaws and Fifty Flaws of a Hunting Dog," published in Hunting Journal [Zhurnal okhoty] in 1876 (PSS (Soch.) 10: 272-77).21 Turgenev returned to sporting subjects in the series of "poems in prose"

[stikhotvoreniia v proze] he composed from 1878 to 1882, especially "The Sparrow" [Vorobei] and "The Partridges" [Kuropatki]. In "The Sparrow," dated April 1878, the narrator returns from a hunting sally with his dog Tre sor and witnesses an adult sparrow boldly defend a fallen fledgling. "The Par tridges" (1882) depicts a single partridge, wounded by a hunter, lying terni

19. See Aksakov 1956, 4: 636-37.

20. In a letter to I. P. Borisov, 28 January (9 February) 1865, Turgenev writes, "He is such a

fine dog that the entire universe is astonished at him?crowned heads [...] pay homage to him

and offer enormous sums for him. He searches out any wounded beast or bird so well that he is

truly becoming a legend [...]. Ask any urchin in the Grand Duchy of Baden if he's heard of

P?gase, the dog belonging to a local Russian, and he won't know anything about the Russian, but he'll know P?gase!" (PSS (Pis'ma) 6: 98).

21. For an analysis and complete translation, see Hodge.


fied, under cover, as the hunting dog approaches. The last hunting story he completed before his death was "The Quail" [Perepelka], a short work that Turgenev, invited by Sofia Tolstaia, wrote in the autumn of 1882 as a contri bution to Tolstoy's Stories for Children [Rasskazy dlia detei], published in early 1883. Turgenev tells a story from his childhood in which he grieves over a mother quail who is killed by his father's dog when she flies out to distract the hunters from her hidden young.

It should come as no surprise that Turgenev's conception of the natural world was profoundly influenced by his identity as a hunter, or that his most deeply thought out excursus on nature should appear in his ecstatic second review of Aksakov's Notes of an Orenburg-Province Hunter (PSS (Soch.) 4: 509-22). Writing at the height of his association with hunting literature, Turgenev de clares, "I passionately love nature, especially in her living manifestations" (4: 516), both to clarify that his affection is for flora and fauna- as opposed to inanimate elements of the natural landscape -and to assert that even a man who kills animals for sport paradoxically loves what he destroys. Aksakov himself had said as much in his Notes: "we [hunters] have our own logic: the more respect you have for a bird, the harder you try to shoot it" (1998, 131). Turgenev explicitly asserts that humans and animals are one- fellow beings on the same continuum of existence (PSS (Soch.) 4: 516). This holism is deepened and made more complex, however, in the passage that follows: Without question, in her [nature's] entirety she constitutes one great, well-proportioned whole every point within her is united with every other point-but at the same time her aspiration is that precisely each point, each separate unit within her, exist exclusively for itself, consider itself the center of the universe, turn to its own advantage everything around it, negate the independence of those surroundings and take possession of them as its own property [...]. Direct your attention for a few moments to the fly that freely flits from your nose to a lump of sugar, to a drop of honey

in the heart of a flower-and you will understand what I mean; you will understand that she is decidedly being herself just as much as you are being yourself. How, from this separation and breaking into pieces by means of which everything seems to live only for itself, how that self same universal, endless harmnony, in which, conversely, all that lives lives for another and only in another attains its reconciliation or its resolution, and all lives merge into a single, world-wide life-this is one of those "open" secrets that we all see and do not see. (4: 516-17)

Turgenev rightly suspected that this quasi-mystical passage with its Darwin ian overtones would be cut by the censor, yet he also believed that it consti tuted the chief interest of this review for non-hunters, even if it seemed to verge on what he called "pantheism."22

The prose-poem "Nature" [Priroda], composed in 1879, sheds light on Turgenev's view of the natural struggle for survival he had outlined in the second Aksakov review. "Nature" offers a dream-vision in which a majestic

woman, clad in green and lost in thought, is the personification of Nature. The

22. See Turgenev's letters to Annenkov, 10 January 1853 (PSS (Pis'ma) 4: 672) and Sergei

Aksakov, 5 and 9 February 1853 (PSS (Pis'ma) 2: 203).


narrator addresses her as "our universal mother [nasha obshchaia mat']" and asks her about her plans for humanity. The goddess-like figure replies that she is contemplating how best to impart more power to the legs of the flea to re store equilibrium [ravnovesie] between attack and defense. To the narrator's shocked response - Is not Man Nature's favorite child? -Nature declares

All creatures are my children [...] and I look after them equally-and destroy them equally [...] I know neither good nor evil... I gave you life-and I will take it away and give it to others, to worms and to people... it's all the same to me... (PSS (Soch.) 10: 165)

The crucial message is clear: Nature's goal is balance [ravnovesie], and she can attain this only through perfect indifference [ravnodushie]. The same con clusion had been reached at the conclusion of Turgenev's "Journey to the For est Belt" nearly a quarter-century earlier, when the hunter-narrator finally grasped what Jane Costlow has called the "elemental indifference" of nature at story's end (PSS (Soch.) 5: 147; Costlow 109). In "The Tit" [Sinitsa], a short poem Turgenev wrote in 1863 as a song-text to be set to music by Pauline Viardot, the penultimate stanza runs

B nieceHKe TBoeI IHpHBeTHoIl In your song of greeting CJiyx nIieHH yweJIn xc MOBI Is my hearing held captive JIHMb HpHpoqI 6e30TBeTHo0i Only by the indifferent play PaBioHyIaHoIo HIFpoH? Of unanswering nature? [my italics]

(PSS (Soch.) 12: 298)

If one characteristic remains consistent in all Turgenev's writing about nature, it is that the organic world, in spite of its maternal beauty, is utterly indiffer ent to human beings.23

I have already noted the hunter's love for game animals, in spite of their status as prey to be killed, but an even stronger emotional bond exists be tween hunter and dog. Satirized by Gogol in his portrayal of Nozdrev's ardor for hunting dogs in the fourth chapter of Dead Souls, fascination with dogs is a commonplace in Turgenev's writing, as A. D. P. Briggs has amply demon strated. A direct result of countless hours spent shooting, Turgenev's sympa thy for dogs is perhaps most famously displayed in the story "Mumu," which he wrote in the spring of 1852 while under arrest. An even more striking example is to be found in "The Dog" [Sobaka], a very short poem in prose Turgenev completed in February 1878: "I understand that in this moment, in both [my dog] and in me, there lives one and the same feeling, that there is no difference between us. We are identical; in each of us burns and shines the same trembling little flame" (10: 129).

Turgenev's love for dogs intensifies the agony and pathos in "The Spar row," "The Partridges," and "The Quail" -all tales in which a dog kills, or

23. See Jackson's analysis of nature's indifference (230-32) in his brilliant delineation of

Turgenev's aesthetic world-view vis-?-vis that of Dostoevsky; Allen (56-57) deftly extends

Jackson's conception into a discussion of the psychology of pain in Turgenev's work.


presages imminent death for, a defenseless bird. The basic plot of "The Spar row" and "The Quail" revolves around the instinct of parent birds to decoy predators away from their young, a form of behavior frequently noted by Ak sakov, especially among shorebirds and waders.24 "The Partridges" was com pleted in June 1882, when Turgenev was already tortured by the spinal can cer that would take his life fourteen months later. Lying in bed, in agony, late at night, the narrator asks why he must suffer and declares that his torment is undeserved. A vision comes to him of a whole family of about twenty young partridges. They are happily hidden in the underbrush, when suddenly a dog flushes them, they fly up in unison, a shot is heard, and one of them falls, its wing broken. As the dog searches the bushes for the wounded bird, it asks, "Why, out of those twenty, must I die? How do I deserve this more than my sisters? It's not fair!" The narrator concludes the sketch by bringing the dying partridge to bear on his own life, with this desolate, self-directed imperative: "Just lie there, ailing creature, until death finds you" (10: 187).

In Chapter 27 of Fathers and Children, Bazarov lies dying of the typhus in fection he carelessly acquired while autopsying a peasant who had failed to seek medical help from Bazarov's father, Vasily Ivanovich, soon enough to stave off the deadly rickettsia. When Vasily finally learns of his son's mishap and applies silver nitrate -ominously known as adskii kamen' [hell-stone] in nineteenth-century Russian parlance -it is far too late to save him.

In a state of partial delirium, the moribund nihilist expresses his thoughts in a series of animal and classical images, calling Arkady a fledgling and a jackdaw; implying that he will set out for the Elysian Fields; calling himself a "half-crushed worm"; and declaring that he won't "wag his tail" [viliat' khvostom] in the face of death (7: 178, 183). Of all his delirious comments, however, perhaps the most striking and suggestive is Bazarov's vision of the "red dogs." As he struggles to ask his father to bring Odintsova to his deathbed, Bazarov says, LIOKa X JIe)KaJI, MHe BCe Ka3aJIoCb, IITO BoKpyr MeHA1 KpaCHbIe Co6aKH 6eraflH, a TbI HagO MHOI

CTOHKY aeJIaR, KaK Hag TeTepeBOM. To'lHO A nbAHblI. TbI xopoino MeHA IOHHMaeInb? (7: 177)

Even now I'm not too sure I'm expressing myself clearly. When I was lying there before, I seemed to see red dogs running all around me and you pointing at me as if I were a woodcock. Just like I was drunk. Can you understand me well? (1994, 148)

Bazarov's hallucination has elicited splendid commentary from Jane Costlow (Costlow 133-37), prominent mention in a recent detective novel by Leonid luzefovich, and even seems to have prompted a popular rock song by the Novosibirsk band Kalinov Most.

The passage has been translated many different ways, but almost always misleadingly, when we keep in mind Turgenev's peerless expertise in the spe

24. See Aksakov's comments in Aksakov 1998 on great snipe (33), black-tailed godwits (44), redshanks (54), coots (142), curlews (174-75), and plovers (180).


cific terminology and technique of hunting, and that earlier evidence in the novel clearly shows that Bazarov, too, is conversant with the lexicon of field sport.25 A cynegetically informed literal translation, in my view, should read something like this:

While I was lying here, it seemed all the time that Irish setters were running around me, while you [Vasily Ivanovich] performed a set over me, as if over a black grouse.

While this is a moment of delirium, the scenario is clearly a representation of wildfowling, not coursing with hounds; only bird-dogs "set" over their mas ters' prey. In that context, the krasnye sobaki are readily recognizable as kras nye settera, a common name for Irish setters in mid-nineteenth-century Rus sia (Sabeneev 182-218). Bazarov sees himself as a black grouse (Lyrurus tetrix), one of the most prized of all game birds in the nineteenth century, and a particular favorite of Turgenev himself.26

Turgenev has carefully chosen a specific sporting combination (Irish setters pointing to a black grouse), and assigned particular roles to a father and son (Vasily Bazarov as a setter and Evgeny Bazarov as the black grouse). In her groundbreaking study, Costlow has suggested that this scene points to the fa mous myth of Actaeon, who is devoured by his hounds after being trans formed into a stag by Diana, angry that the young hunter has seen her naked body as she bathed (Costlow 133-37). While this insight is a brilliant one, I propose to modify and extend it by analyzing -in cynegetic context -the ele ments of Bazarov's vision and suggesting further links to classical antiquity.

In his other novels and stories, Turgenev mentions black grouse in two basic contexts. The first is the bird's strange vocalizations, which Turgenev employs metaphorically to describe indistinct speech in both A Gentry Nest and Virgin Soil.27 The second context is a literal one: hunting for the bird. In this connection, the black grouse is mentioned prominently in nine of the Notes of a Hunter sketches: as a sign of environmental health and a luxurious gentry pursuit ("Khor and Kalinych"); a relatively easy quarry for Ermolai ("Ermolai and the Miller's Wife"); and one of the most frequent enticements for the narrator to embark on hunting trips.28

25. "You have a little marsh here along the aspen grove. I scared up about five common

snipe; you can kill them, Arkady" (PSS (Soch.) 1: 27). 26. Richard Hare's translation (219) is therefore the most accurate of all: "blackcock" is a

term denoting the male black grouse. Stevens's "grouse" (341), though considerably more ac

curate than "woodcock" or "partridge," is of little help, since the Russian glukhar', teterev,

riabchik, and belaia kuropatka are all "grouse" of one species or another.

27. See Dvorianskoe gnezdo, Chapter 19 ("oh 6opMOTan, Kaie TeTepe?") andNov', Chapter 30

("Be;p> Bee o#ho h to ace flOJi?HJi, Kax TeTepeB KaKo?!"). 28. Within the Zapiski okhotnika cycle, the black grouse appears in "Khor' i Kalinych" (open

ing paragraph), "Ermolai i mel'nichikha," "Bezhin lug," "Kas'ian s Krasivoi Mechi," "Burmistr"

(opening paragraph), "Smert"' (opening paragraph), "Chertopkhanov i Nedopiuskin" (opening

paragraph), "Zhivye moshchi" (opening paragraph), and "Stuchit" (opening sentence).


Turgenev studied and relished Aksakov's commentary on black grouse: the penultimate passage in Turgenev's first Aksakov review is a long excerpt from Aksakov's description of the mating habits of black grouse, and in the second review, Turgenev famously singled out the bird in order to pay Aksakov a con spicuous compliment: "If a black grouse could talk about himself, he would, I am sure, add not a word to what Mr. Aksakov has related about him" (PSS (Soch.) 4: 518). The longest chapter of Aksakov's Orenburg-Province Hunter is devoted to black grouse, and it divulges many details crucial to any interpre tation of Bazarov's delirium. We learn from Aksakov that though partridge are very hard to kill, only the black grouse is tougher (1998, 186). In the mating call [tokovanie] of the male black grouse, Aksakov asserts that "There is noth ing pleasing to the ear about the notes themselves, yet in them one subcon sciously senses and understands the harmony of life in nature as a whole" (230, my italics). The elaborately flirtatious mating ritual, which takes place in a particular mating-ground [tokovishche], is a well-known spectacle: the site is

[...] unchanging and regularly frequented [...]. Determined human efforts are required to com pel the grouse to leave it and choose another [...] The blackcock sit on the upper branches, ceaselessly extending their necks downward, as though making low bows, curtsying and then straightening up, stretching their distended necks to the limit, hissing, muttering and calling, and letting their wings droop during their more energetic movements in order to maintain their bal ance [...]. Furious fighting erupts: the males seize one another by the neck and drag one another about, pecking and scratching mercilessly, while blood spatters and feathers fly [...] and at the edge of the arena the lucky ones, or the nimblest, copulate with the females, who are utterly in different to the battles being fought for their favors. (Aksakov 1998, 231-32; my italics)

One of the popular forms of hunting for black grouse, Aksakov tells us, is the pursuit of the juvenile birds [tetereviata], and in this form of sport the hunter relies not on his prowess with a gun, but on his dog (Aksakov 1998, 234). The hunting-dog's set for young black grouse is described: "A good dog with a superior sense of smell will not scratch for long at the traces but will circle and scout close to its master, soon picking up the scent of a covey, pointing [sdelaet stoiku] - sometimes at distances of a hundred paces or more - and lead its master straight to the birds" (235). In precisely this setting, Turgenev comments, in his "Fifty Flaws," that ill-trained dogs will attack the juvenile birds: "[Canine flaw no.] 7: Rushes from the set and seizes the game, which happens particularly often with young black grouse [molodye tetereva]" (PSS (Soch.) 10: 275; Hodge 305). Female black grouse do their best to decoy the hunter away from their young, "But the fowler who knows these ploys will kill the mother straight away; then his dog will seek out all the young one by one, and a good shot [...] will bring them all down without fail [...] a dog will seek them all out if it has been trained to do so" (Aksakov 1998, 235; my ital ics). Older juveniles are readily shot while perched, almost suicidally refus ing to budge: "nothing is easier than shooting every last one, as nothing will

induce them to fly from the tree" (236). Some hunters employ blinds and


place decoys for the easily duped black grouse: "In this respect black grouse are so stupid that if you put a charred stump, a tussock, or a cap on a perch they will fly to join it, or so I am told" (242).

It should be clear by now that Turgenev's selection of black grouse for Bazarov's alter-ego was no random choice. The bird's toughness, stubborn ness, association with natural harmony, fervor in pursuit of a mate, oblivious ness to lethal threats, and ultimate stupidity can all be seen as reinforcing key aspects of Bazarov's behavior, especially in his pursuit of a mate in Odintsova, and her refusal to couple with Bazarov is akin to the indifference Aksakov ex plicitly ascribes to the female black grouse at mating time. At a deeper level, however, given Turgenev's habitual linking of indifference to nature itself, the black-grouse metaphor suggests that Bazarov's anguished pursuit of love is a matter of no consequence not only to Odintsova, but also in the grand scheme of "our universal mother."

The accounts of hunting dogs as they take up a set for young black grouse illustrate vividly the images of pursuit and discovery evoked by Bazarov's fevered vision. Dimly reflecting the playful image of peasant boys chasing after Bazarov "like little dogs" [sobachonki] in Chapter 10,29 these are not hounds who chase and pin down or devour the hapless black grouse, as Ac taeon's coursing hounds consumed the man-stag; Turgenev has explicitly told us elsewhere that only a bad setter would do such a thing. The "red dog" image in Chapter 27 of Fathers and Children -carefully couched in the tech niques of nineteenth-century wildfowling is more subtle, and perhaps more terrifying. The dogs' set [stoika] merely represents the moment of unmasking, the instant when the fearful bird is found out, exposed; death will come later, through the agency of the patient hunter who inexorably follows the dog's lead. Thus the Irish setters of Bazarov's delirium, less overtly harmful than the blood-thirsty hounds of antiquity, are in their methodical way of inform ing on their quarry more chilling, more deliberate -more products of moder nity-than Ovid's vicious stag-hounds. That Bazarov's own father is one of them ("you performed a set over me, as if over a black grouse") provides the coup de grace, the diseased son's clairvoyant recognition of what is so un nervingly powerful about parents: theyfind us. They know us so well, we par take so much of their essence, that they can discover us -unmask us, expose us, point to us- at life's most important junctures -moments of love and death. Perhaps this helps clarify why, a few sentences later, Bazarov mentions the setters one last time, with such pointed intimacy: "And now I must return to my dogs. Strange! I want to focus my thought on death, and nothing comes of it. I see some sort of spot... and nothing more" (PSS (Soch.) 7: 178; my ital ics). Vasily Ivanovich's profound love for his son equips him to see through Bazarov's attempts at self-concealment.

29. PSS (Soch.) 7: 44: "/jBOpOBtie MajibHHimcH ?erajiH 3a '/joxrypOM', Kaie co?anoHKH."


Albeit retrospectively, further poignancy is added to Bazarov's delirium when we recall that "The Partridges," in which the narrator is being searched out by a relentless hunting dog, was Turgenev's way of dramatizing his own wretchedness as he awaited, in the summer of 1882, his own death. In "The Partridges," Turgenev chooses not to describe the moment of death, and we are suspended in a lethal limbo reminiscent of the one Turgenev likened to another form of sport near the conclusion of On the Eve: "Death is like a fisherman who has caught a fish in his net and leaves it in the water for a time: the fish still swims, but the net is around it, and the fisherman will take it up -when he

wishes" (6: 299).30 We must also recall that Bazarov is the son of a meta phorical "hen partridge" [kuropatitsa], Arina Vlasevna: "Vasily Ivanovich compared her to a 'partridge': the cropped tail of her short jacket actually did make her look a bit like a bird" (7: 171; 1994, 142). Fittingly, she considers dogs to be "unclean animals" [nechistye zhivotnye] (7: 113).31 What a horrify ing biological demotion we witness, then, when Arina's beloved son -whom she calls a falcon [sokol] (7:128) and whom Katia identifies as a predator [khishchnyi] (7: 156)-sees himself as a black grouse, a fearful prey species

much more akin to his skittish, partridge-like mother than to a raptor. If we take Bazarov's hallucination of the Irish setters seriously, an impor

tant question looms: who is their figurative master? Surely not the classical goddess, who would have pursued her quarry with gazehounds, but another deity, who metaphorically employs field-dogs to uncover his game. This is a God who stalks his prey by stealth and flushes it before the fatal shot. The subtle implication of a God-like hunter-figure lurking beyond the page -if there are field dogs, there must be a hunter close behind -lends textual reso nance to the novel's famously Christian concluding lines ("eternal reconcili ation and life everlasting"; 7: 188) which allude to the Orthodox funeral can ticle "So sviatymi upokoi" as well as to Pushkin's "indifferent nature" at the close of "Whether I wander down noisy streets" [Brozhu li ia vdol' ulits shum nykh, 1829] (see PSS (Soch.) 7: 429). Or is the patient hunter merely a figure for the author, Turgenev himself, as he prepares to dispatch his most notori ous fictional character? 32

By no means does the foregoing erase Costlow's linking of Bazarov's dogs

30. The passage could well be a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 9:12: "Moreover, no man knows

when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men

are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them" (NIV). 31. "[ApHHa BjiacLeBHa...] ?oajiacb Mtiine?, y?ce?, jurrynieic, BOpo?beB, m?rBOK, rpoMa,

xojio?Ho? BOflM, CKB03Horo BeTpa, jioniaAe?, K03JIOB, pbi^cHx jiio^en h nepHbix KOineK h

noHHTajia CBepnKOB h co?aK HenncTbiMH ?KHBOTHbiMH." Also noteworthy in this context is Arina

Vlasevna's distaste for red-heads [ryzhie liudi], reminding us of Bazarov's Irish setters. Intrigu

ingly, in her fear of grass-snakes and drafts, Arina resembles Odintsova.

32. Another question remains: why does Turgenev have Bazarov see more than one dog

(plural sobaki)! The orthodox use of field dogs prescribes one dog per hunter, which implies that Bazarov senses the presence of more than one hunter-figure.


to the Actaeon myth: the connection to Diana is valid and vital. To conclude, I will therefore explore how hunting motifs and nature-images bring Tur genev's reader into provocative encounters with classical antiquity that deepen our sense of the timelessness of Bazarov's predicament. The abun dance and complexity of Turgenev's references, explicit and implicit, to the classical world make it impossible to treat all of them here. Instead, I will focus on two: stoicism and the goddess Diana.

In the simplest terms, stoical ethics can be summarized as holding that a good life is achieved through recognition that the four primary passions - ap petite, pleasure, fear, distress - are failures of the rational mind to come to correct conclusions and must therefore be discarded.33 Striving to remove the irrationality of passion from one's life brought the stoic sage closer to har

mony with nature's own equanimity. In the opening of Chapter 26, Turgenev playfully satirizes his characters'

vain attempts to live out the stoic prescription. By placing them in a carefully described "Greek portico [portik] made of Russian bricks," the author makes a clear reference to the ancient stoa poikile, or "painted portico" in the agora of ancient Athens, where the philosopher Zeno (335-263 BCE) and his disci ples founded the new strain of Hellenistic thinking that took its name, sto icism, from the building they frequented.34 The structure itself reflects the ideal of indifference espoused in its ancient predecessor: even at midday, according to the narrator, it was cool inside the portico. Tellingly, Katia often visits this part of the estate, and it is here, we learn, that she seemingly takes the place of the mothballed statue of the "goddess of Silence" and communes with nature: "Surrounded by freshness and shade, she used to read, work, or surrender her self to that feeling of complete silence which is probably familiar to everyone and the charm of which consists in a barely conscious, mute watchfulness for the broad wave of life ceaselessly rolling around and within us" (PSS (Soch.) 7: 164). Katia's meditative mood here invokes familiar elements of Turgenev's conception of nature -unconsciousness, quietness, watchfulness, ubiquity, holism-and she is the most successful of all the novel's characters in ap proaching the stoic ideal of harmony with nature through suppression of pas sion. It comes as no surprise that her sister Anna Odintsova, a bad stoic be cause her life is largely governed by fear, dislikes the portico, having encountered there a frightening element of the natural world: a grass snake. Yet in this late chapter, at least one of the novel's "children" will submit to his emotions and abandon the stoic ideal: in defiance of that ideal, Arkady specifi

33. See Long and Sedley 419-20. One prominent historian of philosophy has recently la

beled this aspect of the stoic project as "the extirpation of the passions" (Nussbaum 2:

359-401). 34. Turgenev explicitly addresses stoic ethics through the character of Baburin, who is fas

cinated by Zeno's teachings in the story "Punin i Baburin" (1872-74) (PSS (Soch.) 9: 33, 445). See also Finch 119-20.


cally invites Katia to the portico -the temple of stoicism- in order to propose marriage to her. She receives his halting preamble to the proposal with consid erable aplomb: "Katia said nothing in reply [...]. Katia still didn't raise her eyes; she seemed not to understand where all this was leading and kept wait ing for something more [...]. She was sitting in the same position[...]. 'You're not answering?'[...]" (7: 165-67; 1994, 137-38). (Here Turgenev, with the hunter's expert knowledge of birds, mockingly has a chaffinch [ziablik], a classical symbol of bachelorhood, sing merrily in a birch branch over poor Arkady's head.35) Katia's assent to the match is dispassionate, and she seems amused at herself for succumbing: "after a long pause for thought, with scarcely a smile, she said, 'Yes.'[...] she wept innocently, laughing softly at her own tears" (7: 167; 1994, 139). Katia, a stand-in for the Goddess of Silence, and a habitue of the stoic temple, is thus made akin to the indifferent figure of Nature in the prose-poem "Nature" that Turgenev would write nearly two decades later. It is no surprise, therefore, to read in Chapter 17 of Fathers and Children that "Katia adored nature [obozhala prirodu]."36

Though Costlow has duly noted Katia's association with the natural world and rightly asserted that she is "at home" with it, in direct contrast to her sis ter's fear of it, it is Odintsova whom Costlow sees as the Diana figure in the novel. While Costlow points out that the classical motif of the bath is associ ated with both Odintsova and Diana (135), Odintsova's discomfort in the nat ural world is uncharacteristic of the goddess of the hunt. In pointed contrast to Katia's -and Diana's -adoration of nature, Odintsova is described as "rather indifferent [dovol'no ravnodushna]" to it.

The cynegetic evidence in the novel points to a much more likely Diana figure in Katia herself. Gazehounds are invariably associated with the god dess of the hunt in Western art and literature, and the only representative of this ancient canine group in Fathers and Children is Fifi, a "beautiful borzoi" who first appears in Chapter 16 (7: 77). Consistently depicted as Katia's faith ful companion, Fifi enters the room before her mistress (7: 80), precisely as a hunting hound would precede its master in the field. As Arkady pets Fifi for show, the narrator tells us that Katia, not unlike the bashful Diana, "was hid ing, having retreated into herself [...]. She wasn't exactly shy, merely distrust ful" (7: 82; 1994, 67). Fifi is next mentioned, prominently, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 25: she lies on the ground, stretched out "like a hare, as hunters put it [u okhotnikov slyvet 'rusach'ei polezhkoi']," while Katia and

35. The chaffinch's Latin name, Fringilla coelebs, means "celibate finch"; it is "derived from

the Latin word for 'without marriage,' and acknowledges the preponderance of male chaffinches

that winter in northern parts of their range, while females migrate further to the south" (Freed man and Hoyle 323-39).

36. The archaic, primary meaning of obozhaV was the same as modern obozhestvliat ': to

make a god out of (someone or something). The root Bog in obozhaV thus hints much more

clearly than English adore that Katia views nature as tantamount to a goddess.


Arkady feed sparrows in the garden (7: 154). Here we learn that Fifi's coat is yellow, which distances her further from the ruddy setters of Bazarov's later hallucination, and in this scene Katia, with a huntress's expertise, classifies Bazarov as predatory [khishchnyi], and herself and Arkady as tame [ruchnoi] (7: 156). In spite of Fifi's amiable personality, Odintsova is presented in this chapter as "standing on the path and scratching Fifi's ears with the tip of her closed parasol" (7: 159; 1994, 132), as though she prefers to keep a healthy distance from what is, after all, the most dangerous animal to appear in Fa thers and Children. This last detail further supports the notion that Katia, not Odintsova, is mistress of the gazehound and therefore, to judge from hunting motifs, a closer counterpart to Diana.

Turgenev was well aware of the ancient literature of hunting and cognizant of the links between the world of nineteenth-century Russian sport and the venatic world of biblical and classical antiquity. In his second Aksakov re view, Turgenev states bluntly, "I could adduce striking proof that hunting oc cupies far from last place in human life and the history of humanity... I will remark only that hunting must justly be considered one of man's most impor tant undertakings" (PSS (Soch.) 4: 514).37

The Actaeon-Diana allusion near the end of Fathers and Children is, how ever, merely the central panel of a Diana triptych that Turgenev crafted over the span of several decades. His updated recasting of the Actaeon story is spread over three separate works that span Turgenev's life as a writer: one, in verse, from the beginning of his career; one, in prose, from the middle (Fa thers and Children); and one, a "poem in prose," from the end. The first of these three, "Summer Hunting," recreates Ovid's setting for Ac

taeon's encounter with Diana. The one anachronism in the nineteenth-century atmosphere of "Summer Hunting" -the presence of dryads [driady], which are

37. Turgenev then goes on to trace ancient hunting references, beginning with Nimrod in

Hebrew scripture, who is described in the Book of Genesis as "the mighty hunter before the

Lord" (Genesis 10:9); when Turgenev describes Bazarov as a great fancier [velikii okhotnik] of women and womanly beauty" in Chapter 17 of Fathers and Children, he is probably paro

dying this same biblical reference (the original Church Slavonic for the passage is "ce? 6e

HcnojiHH jiOBeu; npefl IbcnofleM"; the standard Russian translation is "chjibhbih 3BepojiOB, KaK

HHMpo?, npe/? TocnoflOM"). Next in the Aksakov review Turgenev cleverly quotes a quatrain from The Odyssey which describes Odysseus's vision of Orion's ghost in the eleventh canto:

Odysseus is here invoking the souls of departed heroes, just as Turgenev is reminding his own

readers of prominent ancient hunters. An immediate rhetorical leap takes us from the hunters

of old to hunters in his native Russia, including Vladimir Monomakh, Aleksei Mikhailovich, and finally Aksakov. Turgenev's own hunting dogs also dramatically illustrate the way he

played with links to classical mythology. As we have already seen, one of his favorite dogs was

called "P?gase," the French for Pegasus. An equally cherished animal, the yellow-piebald En

glish pointer who even makes a fictional appearance in "Bezhin Meadow" [Bezhin lug], he

named "Diana" (fl,HaHa) (Turgenev, PSS (Soch.) 3: 88). Turgenev so loved this dog that he

buried her with his own hands under the oak tree he had planted on his estate at Spasskoe-Lu tovinovo; see Shapochka 42.


woodland nymphs -points directly toward Ovid's text.38 Unlike the violent tale in Metamorphoses, Turgenev's narrative here emphasizes a nourishing

mother-son relationship between the "eternal mother" and the weary hunters. "Nymphs," one of Turgenev's poems in prose, was written in December

1878, and is his last fiction devoted to Diana. The piece is based on a famous tale from Plutarch's "De Defectu Oraculorum" [On the disappearance of ora cles], in which, during the reign of Tiberius, the pilot of a ship on the Aegean Sea is ordered by a mysterious voice to declare that "Great Pan is dead" as he

passes the island of Palodes, and the announcement is met by great lamenta tion.39 Turgenev's brief tale begins with the narrator standing before a range of beautiful, forest-covered mountains under a southern sky and there recall ing the first-century tale of the pilot's cry. A "strange thought" then enters his head to repeat the ancient proclamation of Pan's death, but the beauty around him prompts the narrator to call out, instead, "He is risen! Great Pan is risen!" (PSS (Soch.) 10: 158).40 Nymphs, dryads, and bacchants joyously descend from the mountains to the valley, amid scarlet flashes of naked bodies and the white of billowing tunics. Diana joins the revelers, but Turgenev's story con cludes sadly, with the goddess's abrupt departure as she descries a Christian church glowing on the horizon. "Nymphs" functions as Turgenev's lament for the passing of pagan intimacy with the natural world, and his narrator's glimpse of the goddess is, once again, not a threatening or fatal one, as it was in Actaeon's case. Turgenev's Diana triptych-Fathers and Children and two

volets -is complete. The philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that "Every good hunter is un

easy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to

inflict on the enchanting animal" (102). No doubt this unease stems in part from the hunter's inevitable act of empathy, of considering the horror he

would feel in the animal's place. In Book V of his Dionysiaca, Nonnos mem

orably captures this emotion when he calls the transformed Actaeon, fleeing through the forest in fear of his life, "the hunter in terror of hunters" [Gk. thereter tromeon theretoras] (Nonnos 190-91, 1. 325). A reading of Fathers and Sons in its cynegetic context suggests that Tur

genev, a good hunter, painstakingly explored this terror. For him, the Actaeon/ Diana myth echoed the revulsion he felt when meditating upon his own death;

38. Though Ovid's account of Actaeon's confrontation with Diana refers to nymphs without

explicit mention of dryads, the Roman poet does mention them elsewhere in Book 3, in the story of Narcissus.

39. For an exhaustive analysis of this story and its complex hermeneutic legacy, see

Borgeaud. The death of Pan has been taken up by many writers, among them Rabelais, Walter

de la Mare, Robert Frost, and Eugene O'Neill (Irwin 160). 40. "Voskres! Voskres Velikii Pan!" is an irreverent modification of the Orthodox Christian

practice of proclaiming, on Easter, "Christ is risen, verily He is risen!" (Khristos voskres, vois

tine voskres!), especially in view of the tradition, dating from the patristic period, that the com

manding voice in Plutarch's tale was the voice of God declaring the end of the pagan era and

commencement of the age of Christ; see PSS (Soch.) 10: 506, and Borgeaud 260 ff.


when hunter and hunted reverse roles, Turgenev seems to imply, we experi ence afresh the awful frisson of impending extinction. Actaeon's hounds are indifferent to their mute master, just as indifferent nature shines upon the grave of the poet in Pushkin's "Whether I wander down noisy streets." Per haps one of the elemental attractions of hunting, for Turgenev, was that it put him close to the natural world he loved and studied. Being a hunter allowed him at once a pagan proximity to the "eternal mother" and a Christian sense of non-indifference -of the keenest possible interest in his quarry. Turgenev's fiction, in its extensive re-imaginings of Actaeon's encounter with Diana, echoes, in literary terms, these twin identities, most prominently in the final paragraph of Fathers and Children. Here, and in the strange vision of the Irish setters, God becomes a nineteenth-century hunter, stalking carefully toward the wounded prey, firing the merciful final shot to put the creature out of its misery. If "Nymphs" illustrates Turgenev's affection for the simple liberty and naturalness of pagan life, perhaps its conclusion hints faintly at his yearn ing for the restrictive but consolatory role of Christianity. The cynegetic episodes of Fathers and Children represent the first mature expressions of that pagan-Christian tension in Turgenev's fiction.

Jane Costlow rightly views Bazarov as an unmasker, an exposer of euphe mism (127). Seen this way, Bazarov's role as an attacker fits in neatly with Nature's conception of existence as a struggle "between attack and defense" (10: 165), as does Katia's classification of people as either tame or predatory (7: 156). Ultimately, however, a cynegetic reading of Turgenev's work yields the unsettling truth that these binary categories are not mutually exclusive, but overlap constantly: in the face of love and death, Bazarov the falcon, Bazarov the hunter, is also Bazarov the black grouse, precisely akin to the quaking, perdecine narrator of "Partridges." Far from being meaningless, however, the categories of hunter and hunted, especially their classical incar nations, are crucial reminders that all denizens of nature are in some sense both predator and prey, and that the only ultimate, omnipotent hunter is Na ture herself. Such a conception merely confirms what Turgenev had asserted in his second review of Aksakov's hunting treatise: Nature's "aspiration is that precisely each point, each separate unit within her, exist exclusively for itself, consider itself the center of the universe, turn to its own advantage everything around it, negate the independence of those surroundings and take possession of them as its own property" (4: 516).

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the 'hunter in terror of hunters': a cynegetic reading of

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