Everyone who studies or teaches Ivan Turgenev will want to read this book. The subject, as the title indicates, is the link between Turgenev's lifelong passion for hunting and his writing. It was hunting that connected him to nature, and also to Russian peasant culture through the huntsmen who accompanied him on his shoots. One of the strengths of Thomas Hodge's book is his weaving of the insights of others into his text; nonetheless, it turns out there is more to say. For one thing, no one has as thoroughly embedded Turgenev's writing in the history of hunting, or the genre of writings about hunting in vogue in the mid-nineteenth century. Hodge thoroughly illustrates the crucial importance of details of nature and the hunt in Turgenev's fiction. Over and over again he demonstrates how a reference to a specific plant or animal—in the latter case mostly hunting dogs and game birds—provides both scientific and cultural knowledge that illuminates the text from below its surface. For instance, through 1868, in his writing Turgenev mentions hunting twenty-two different species (46). His favorite is the black grouse (teterev), which can play a metaphorical as well as a cultural and factual role in texts (150–51), but there are many other examples of this. Hodge also pays close attention to linguistic nuances embedded in Russian words with their broad semantic fields. In Turgenev's time, for instance, there were three words for nature (natura, estestvo, and priroda) and Hodge explains that his book analyzes Turgenev's use of the broadest of these—priroda—“chiefly by scrutinizing his conception and practice of hunting” (5). The word hunting itself (okhota), with its etymological connection to desire and hence to the feelings as well as practice of the hunter, expands the scope of his study (35–37). He relies in part on Oleg Egorov, the foremost modern scholar of Russian hunting, to make his case.
Chapter 1 discusses Turgenev's thought about nature, which comes out of his education in German romantic philosophy as practiced by Fredrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Aleksandr Herzen, and others, and from practical knowledge gained over decades in the field. His writing as Hodge presents it is both “anthropotropic”—drawing everything, including nature, into the human sphere—and “ecotropic,” in which everything is defined in terms of nature. It is philosophical but not sentimental: nature in it is indifferent (19) towards individuals, and the artist, preserving equilibrium in his creation at the expense of happy endings, is like nature in this regard (26). As Hodge puts it in chapter two, which is on the relation of hunting and art, very frequently in Turgenev's prose, as in nature, the success of one character depends on the death of another (62). Chapter 3 focuses on Notes of a Hunter and especially the relation of hunting to power (proizvol). Chapter 4 then turns to two crucial reviews Turgenev published in 1852 and 1853 on the treatise by Slavophile and close friend Sergei Aksakov entitled Notes of an Orenburg Hunter. These include Turgenev's most profound direct statements on nature. Everything lives for itself alone, and yet all is harmony in nature (114–16). Both these principles and the struggle between them are present in Turgenev's prose, including its structure and plot. Especially striking in this respect is the analysis of the story “The Inn” (Postoialyi dvor), written at the same time as the second Aksakov review (113–16). Chapter 5, on “Journey to the Forest Belt,” Rudin, and A Gentry Nest, explains how nature is incorporated into the mature long form of the Turgenevian novel, which “comes to favor anthropotropic meanings embedded in putatively ecotropic observations” (131). Chapter 6 analyzes First Love, On the Eve, and Fathers and Children, which focus less on hunting, but still integrate lessons about nature gleaned from it. Hodge's reading of the mistaken concentration of scientists like Bazarov on matter as equivalent to priroda is one important example of this (171–72).
The book includes and discusses illustrations related to its subject. In appendices, Hodge provides a great service by translating the articles on Aksakov. The appendices also include a chronology of Turgenev's statements throughout life on the indifference of nature, and a translation of a late article entitled “The Hunter's Fifty Flaws and Fifty Flaws of a Gun Dog” (1876). It is an example of Turgenev's moral concerns about hunting late in his life (192–97).
