Liza; Or, "A Nest of Nobles"

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( Leisure Hour Series .)
1873
His first prose work, the Notes of a Sportsman ( Zapiski Okhotnika ), a collection of sketches of country life, made a deep and lasting impression upon the minds of the educated classes in Russia, so vigorous were its attacks upon the vices of that system of slavery which was then prevalent. Those attacks had all the more weight, inasmuch as the book was by no means exclusively devoted to them. It dealt with many other subjects connected with provincial life; and the humor and the pathos and the picturesqueness with which they were treated would of themselves have been sufficient to commend it to the very favorable attention of his countrymen. But the sad pictures he drew in it, occasionally and almost as it were accidentally, of the wretched position occupied by the great masses of the people, then groaning under the weight of that yoke which has since been removed, stirred the heart of Russian society with a thrill of generous horror and sympathy; and the effect thus produced was all the more permanent inasmuch as it was attained by thoroughly legitimate means. Far from exaggerating the ills of which he wrote, or describing them in sensational and declamatory language, he treated them in a style that sometimes seemed almost cold in its reticence and freedom from passion. The various sketches of which the volume was composed appeared at intervals in a Russian magazine, called the Contemporary (Sovremennik) , about three-and-twenty years ago, and were read in it with avidity; but when the first edition of the collected work was exhausted, the censors refused to grant permission to the author to print a second, and so for many years the complete book was not to be obtained in Russia without great difficulty. Now that the good fight of emancipation has been fought, and the victory—thanks to the present Emperor—has been won, M. Turgénieff has every reason for looking back with pride upon that phase of the struggle; and his countrymen may well have a feeling of regard, as well as of respect, for him—the upper-classes as for one who has helped them to recognize their duty; the lower, as for a very generous supporter in their time of trouble.