SOURCE: Eekman, Thomas. “Turgenev and the Shorter Prose Forms.” In Text and Context: Essays To Honor Nils Åke Nilsson, edited by Peter Alberg Jensen, Barbara Lönnqvist, Fiona Björling, Lars Kleberg, and Anders Sjöberg, pp. 42-52. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987.

[In the following essay, Eekman discusses the recurring love theme in Turgenev's short stories as well as his repeated use of first person narrators and framed story-within-a-story structural devices.]

Few books in world literature have such a misleading title as Turgenev's Zapiski ochotnika. The actual hunting is restricted to just a few paragraphs, and usually the narrator, before he has caught even one woodcock, has arrived at some country house or somewhere else where he meets people, whose outward appearance and character he describes, whose life history he tells us and whose conversations he renders. No matter how important the function of nature is in his stories, as decoration and as a means to create the atmosphere—Turgenev is primarily a hunter of people, a fascinated observer of human characters, human passions, life vicissitudes, and the mutual relationships of men.

One peculiarity of the Zapiski is that they are all written in first person narration. This can be explained, at least partly, by Turgenev's wish to approach living reality as closely as possible, to strengthen the ties between literary imagination, fiction, and reality. Presumably the Huntsman's Sketches do contain Turgenev's own experiences, meetings, observations and contemplations. Telling a story in the “I”-form has the advantage of diminishing the distance between the author and the reader: the former takes the latter by the hand (“Dajte mne ruku, ljubeznyj čitatel’, i poedemte vmeste so mnoj”—thus begins “Tat'jana Borisovna i ee plemjannik”), he turns directly to him, involves him in the events described; that immediate contact apparently was an attractive point for Turgenev. Especially when speaking of nature he likes to confide to the reader his enthusiasm and admiration, as in the concluding story “Les i step'”. And the “I” is the living tie that binds the stories together.

An additional reason that may induce an author to choose the first person narration is the urge to disclose his inner life, to communicate his intimate thoughts, to make confessions. That confessional character is traditionally inherent in much first person narration. In fact, every writer has a certain need to exhibit his inner I, to confess his intimate thoughts: without that need he would remain silent. And for testimonies about oneself “I”-narration seems the most natural, sincere and believable method.

However, in the Zapiski ochotnika the role of the “I” is different. This “I” never speaks about himself, he always encounters other people and directs our attention toward them; he rarely expresses his own feelings—only when talking about nature and in rare cases when people are concerned (at the end of “Svidanie” he remarks: “… no obraz bednoj Akuliny dolgo ne vychodil iz moej golovy …”). The narrator is the observer and recorder, the reporter who interviews others and who by his questions and remarks provokes other people to speak, to make their confessions and to expose their character. His words are, as a rule, neutral, informative. Sometimes he is simply the witness of events that happen to other people, or of their personal relations. Only in “Birjuk” he himself actively intervenes in the action; and in “Stučit!” (which was written much later than the original series) the narrator himself has an adventure; however, in this story, too, the attention is mainly directed towards other persons: the narrator's coachman, the alleged robbers they meet.

Yet Turgenev sometimes uses the “I”-procedure in a different way. In the story “Ermolaj i mel'ničicha” the landowner Zverkov tells the story of his maid Arina, whom he had refused permission to get married and whom he had chased away when it turned out that she was pregnant. Here it is not the narrator who is talking, but the landowner Zverkov whom he puts on the stage. This story acquires its bitter taste and is so impressive exactly because Turgenev does not retell the story, but we hear it directly from the mouth of the “I”, a feudal lord who is not even aware of the injustice he and his wife have inflicted upon a subordinate.

A different case we find in “Uezdnyj lekar'”, in which the narrator plays again a very limited role—the pith of the story is the tale told by the doctor about a woman patient. It is not a tendentious story, but a love story, and one of an intimate, very personal and tragic character. Our huntsman did not experience the events himself, he is merely the man who takes notes; yet the story is in first person narration, and this way the intimate, confession-like character is reinforced.

The two latter stories belong to the type of frame stories, containing a story which is woven into another story and forming a more or less significant part of that framing story, or at least distracting our attention for some time from that story. This interpolation of secondary stories, figures, and descriptions, which break the strict, simple thread of the narrative, split it, stop it, deflect it and make it more colorful and diversified, is what is happening all the time in the Zapiski. In some instances, as in “Uezdnyj lekar'”, that inner story is so predominant that it acquires primary importance and overgrows the frame. In “Petr Petrovič Karataev”, too, the story this Karataev tells us forms the main part of the text—a story in which both the love element and the anti-feudal element play a role. In “Gamlet ščigrovskogo uezda” the reader is first, for six to seven pages, confronted with various types of landowners until finally the “Hamlet” enters the scene, whose narrative constitutes the kernel of the story; and here again, the inner story is in the first person.

Next to the 25 Huntsman's Sketches, Turgenev left us approximately 35 other stories and novellas of various form, size and character and from various periods in his literary career. To them belong “Ivan Kolosov”, his very first writing to appear in print (1844), as well as the story with the ominous title “Konec”, which he on his deathbed dictated to Pauline Viardot in French, German and Italian. As is well known, he changed the composition of the Huntman's Sketches several times. Among the stories that never figured among the Zapiski there are a few that would perfectly fit among them. They, too, deal with characters (both peasants and landowners), situations, relations and events in the Russian country: “Poezdka v Poles'e”, for example, “Brigadir”, or “Stepnoj korol' Lir”, one of his most powerful stories. “Punin i Baburin” also portrays characters from the Russian countryside, but it exceeds the scope of the Huntsman's Sketches. The first chapter contains childhood reminiscences—of Turgenev himself, or so it seems. The second and third take place later in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the “I” meets the same Punin and Baburin again (there is a fourth chapter, which is actually a short epilogue). On the other hand, “Konec” could as to its form, length, subject matter, atmosphere and style be one of the Huntsman's Sketches. Consequently, no sharp dividing line can be drawn between Turgenev's Zapiski ochotnika and his other shorter prose works. It may be mentioned here that, when size is the criterium, no clear dividing line can be drawn between the stories and novels either. There are stories of 10 to 16 pages, but Vešnie vody has 112 pages, whereas Rudin has only 102 pages.¹

However, size is not the only or the most essential distinction that can be made between a short story or novella and a novel. As a rule, the novel is more elaborate in its structure, its theme and plot, as well as in its delineation of the hero's or heroes' character, often encompassing the whole life or a significant part of the life of one or more persons; whereas the novella does not admit deep psychological analysis and is mostly limited to one episode or moment in the hero's life. Goethe mentioned in his well known conversation with Eckermann “das Unerhörte” as the element characteristic of any novella.² In most definitions or discussions of the genre since then this occurrence of an unheard of, extraordinary event was put forward as a requirement of a good novella. Ludwig Tieck held that the novella “puts a big or small occurrence in the brightest possible light” and presents it as “extraordinary, perhaps unique”; the story should make “an unexpected turnabout”, by which “it will impress itself the deeper in the reader's imagination”.³ Turgenev's older contemporary Nikolaj I. Nadeždin did not recognize this demand of the unusual central event: “The novella [povest'] is an episode from the limitless poem of human vicissitudes.”⁴

However, contemporary theoreticians generally confirm that the novella “depicts a single event with the appurtenances necessary to understand it well”.⁵ “Thus one can recognize the novella by the fact that a chain of motifs leads to a central event, and then possibly away from it again”;⁶ “the occurrence that takes shape in it has the character of the surprising, the unexpected, the incalculable”.⁷ A crisis, a reversal of fortune, a conflict, a pointe is postulated by several writers on the subject.⁸ Such a claim would not apply to some of Čechov's longer stories. But in Turgenev's case, the required central event or climax is usually there. It is reached when the “I” rushes to the place where he expects to find Asja, but she has disappeared; or when the “I” discovers the love affair between Zinaida and his father (“Pervaja ljubov'”); or when Fustov finally returns to the town to find out that Susanna has died (“Nesčastnaja”). In “Klara Milič” at least three such culmination points have been established.⁹

Such a climax is usually absent or much less dramatic in the Huntsman's Sketches. The novels do have a crisis, an apogee, or more than one. But what distinguishes Turgenev's novels thematically from the shorter forms is that the novels have two centers: the hero and society, with which he is in close contact and, at the same time, in conflict.¹⁰ In the novels, the hero is socially involved, and in some cases even a social ideologist—whereas the novellas focus on the hero's personal emotional conflict, his love affair in the majority of cases; the reasons of his defeat are psychological, not social. This is a distinction in epic horizon between novel and novella; and here, too, Turgenev's novellas are closer to the typical romantic, traditional patterns.

In the light of this, we have to reconsider our above remark that the novella does not admit deeper psychological analysis and often deals with just one episode or critical point in the hero's life. Turgenev's shorter prose works are exactly characterized by their not being confined to just that: in them, by means of introductions, by inserting reminiscences or elaborations on the previous lives of the characters, and notably by adding an epilogue which gives glimpses of their later fortunes, he evokes a more or less complete picture of the main protagonists and their fate. And that is a feature which tends to efface the just established distinction between the novel and the novella.

In just seven out of the 25 Huntsman's Sketches is love introduced; rarely is a love affair the main theme of a story (as in “Uezdnyj lekar'”). In the novels love is, of course, a dominating element, except for Otcy i deti. In the novellas, too, love is a momentous factor in the life and the adventures of the heroes—with the exception of a story like “Mumu”, where love appears only in an episode, and of two stories where love is absent: “Sobaka” and “Rasskaz otca Alekseja”, both belonging to Turgenev's “mystic” or mysterious stories in which hallucinations are described.

Thus we see (in case we did not know yet) that love is Turgenev's stock theme, which he handles, elaborates and varies with consummate skill. It is his deeply felt, true to life depiction of the rising stream of love which becomes more and more powerful and carries the hero away, combined with his subtle evocation of atmosphere and fine character analysis that make these stories into such smart, moving, if not gripping, works of literature, even in our times, although the contemporary reader may be used to far more provocative, overtly erotic ways of dealing with the love theme.

Both on the Huntsman's Sketches and related stories and on the series primarily based upon the love motif Turgenev worked during his entire career as a writer. One similarity between the two groups of stories is that most of them are narrated in the first person. Typically, in the beginning of the love story a young man (a military man who arrives in a new garrison or a civil servant on a tour of duty, or simply a traveler) comes into contact with a milieu that is unknown to him, in a small provincial town, on an estate, sometimes in a foreign country, where the love adventure then develops. Recent occurrences or memories are never the subject matter; the narrator always goes back to his adolescence, or even his childhood—cf. stories like “Stepnoj korol' Lir”, “Punin i Baburin”, “Časy”, “Son”, in which he views the events with the candidness, the fresh and sharp observation of a boy. In those cases, however, the narrator himself is not taking part in the love relationship. More frequent are the stories in which the narrator is one of the partners, thinking melancholically back to an episode in his life, which, however, did not have a fatal result for him: he apparently recovered pretty soon from the shock and now he lives on; maybe he has had some other love adventures since then. Vešnie vody is an example: the memory which forms the contents of the story is evoked by a small garnet cross which the hero finds among love letters that came out of a drawer. That memory strikes him strongly, it is true—but apparently he had been able for years to repress it. The epigraph to the story is from an old romance, in which the moments of happiness are being compared to a swiftly fleeting brook in the spring. This mirrors the philosophy Turgenev seems to express. It is a philosophy of resignation, a consciousness that feelings and passions, happiness and sorrow are transient experiences which man is unable to change or to retain. Man, basically a weak, insecure and lonely being, is unable to master the forces of nature that work within him and upon him and set traps for him: he is “being lived” instead of actively shaping and directing his own life, until, before he realizes it, old age descends upon his head like snow (a favorite image of Turgenev), and solely the memory of so many missed opportunities remains.

A large part of these novellas employs the frame structure in some variety, although not all of them are Rahmenerzählungen in the strict, classical sense. From 1855 onward all of Turgenev's stories are provided with a frame, with two exceptions: “Prizraki” and “Klara Milič”. But it is already present in his very first prose work, “Ivan Kolosov”, in its most usual, conventional form: somewhere a small group of gentlemen is conversing, one of them takes the floor and obliges the company with his story; towards the end this company reappears for some concluding comments. In “Andrej Kolosov” we find this classical Turgenevian device in its most complete, most consistently sustained form. “Odin nebol'šoj, blednyj čeloveček” addresses a group of people at the fireside, suggesting that each of them in his turn will tell something about an unusual character. He is urged to begin himself, and thereupon we hear the story of Ivan Kolosov. This introduction occupies approximately a page; during the little gentleman's relation, at least in the beginning, the framing element is not forgotten: the listeners from time to time interrupt the narrator, he asks for a cigar, one of those present twice interrupts him with a quotation from Byron, the little gentleman repeatedly addresses his audience. Such interruptions occur less frequently once the story is well on its way, but even there they are not completely absent. When it is finished one of the listeners asks: “‘And what happened to Varja?’—‘I don't know’, answered the narrator. We all rose to our feet and went home.” Thus the story is concluded by the embracing frame, albeit merely with a few short sentences. The idea that all in turn would tell a story about an unusual personality is not taken up any more. It might be pointed out that this firstling of Turgenev is actually a double first person story, because not only the inner story is told in the first person, but in the framing story, too, the “I” (supposedly the author) takes part (“ja tože byl v čisle sporivšich”).

Two years later (still before his first Huntsman's Sketch) appeared “Tri portreta”. This portrait story is a frame story in an even more extensive sense. It is this time a hunting company to which the “I” also belongs: a double first person narrative again. The actual central story begins after four pages. The narrator hardly plays a role in it: the main characters are his grandfather and some of his contemporaries; yet he throws in a remark from time to time and occasionally addresses his audience. At the end of the story, however, Turgenev fails to lead us back to the company of hunters under the three portraits: he leaves the frame open.

In the years that follow, Turgenev is very much occupied by his Zapiski ochotnika. But in 1850 two non-Zapiski stories are created, and both are frame stories again, in which both the framing and the inner story are narrated in the first person; but the pattern is somewhat diversified. In “Dnevnik lišnego čeloveka” the hero, Čulkaturin, relates his love story, which is a story of the type Turgenev wrote more often, ending in a negative, unhappy way. Čulkaturin's superfluity is not socially indicative, but purely personal, it is a powerlessness, generated by his character, his nature, to gain the respect and concern of other people, and finally also the love of his chosen one: life goes on and gives him the cold shoulder, just like it does other figures from Turgenev's stories. The frame element consists merely of the fact that towards the end, after the last page of the diary, a “Note from the Editor” follows, which informs us that Čulkaturin did pass away the night after he wrote his last note.

The other story from 1850 (published only in 1856), “Perepiska”, has the well known letter form, also used in “Faust” (1855). This time Turgenev has left out the frame altogether (about how the letters were found and published etc.). Yet the framing element is present: it is not a straight narrative, but a story couched within the framework of these nine letters, in which the letter-writer also communicates to his friend other things that have nothing to do with the actual story.

Asja (1857) does have the classical frame structure, although in a reduced form. It is again a story about somebody who is unsuccessful in the decisive moments of his life, who is worried and hampered by his own half-heartedness. He first makes some remarks about himself; then he starts his story. The first printing, in the Sovremennik of 1858, bears the subtitle “Rasskaz N. N.”. But that is all that remained of the frame story idea. It looks like Turgenev got tired of coming out with that party of friends every time and starting the real story only after several introductory pages or paragraphs. It should be mentioned parenthetically that N. N.'s story contains a framed-in story, namely that which Asja's half-brother Gagin tells about her and himself; and in that story again the story is couched relating how Asja came into the world, as told by the man-servant.

The next novella, however, “Pervaja ljubov'”, written three years later (Dvorjanskoe gnezdo and Nakanune came in between), shows again the company of gentlemen, one of whom is talked into telling his love story, with a variation in that he does not start out immediately, but prefers first to write his account down and to read it at the company's next meeting. A concluding return to the company is again lacking. More traditional and complete in their frame structure are “Sobaka” (in which some persons of the listening company are described and called by their names, they repeatedly interrupt the narrator, a good-natured landowner from Kaluga, and come to the front again at the end to express their amazement at the inexplainable events) and “Istorija lejtenanta Ergunova”, a story which is not told once, but which the lieutenant repeats each month for the same group of people (“we”). The “I” of the framing text retells Ergunov's tale, and therefore we find in this inner story, as an exception, not first, but third person narration. The actual story is, in this manner, three times removed from the reader.

Next came “Nesčastnaja”, a frame story in its ideal form, so to speak. This time the framing story has just as much significance, content and dramatic climax as the framed one, with which it is organically connected. The inner story is placed approximately in the middle of the work (which is about 66 pages long) and constitutes more or less the clue to it. It was followed by Turgenev's most extensive novella, Vešnie vody, which does contain love reminiscences and possesses the characteristics of a frame story, but is not written in the first person. Sanin lets the events pass his mind's eye; subsequently the external story is taken up again, we see him returning to the place where thirty years ago the described events took place. All subsequent novellas: “Son”, “Otryvki iz vospominanij svoich i čužich” (consisting of two stories), “Pesn' toržestvujuščej ljubvi” and “Klara Milič” either are complete frame stories or at least contain some frame elements.

Now that we have ascertained how often Turgenev used these devices and procedures, we might ask why he did it. Every writer can have his own designs when using certain methods, or he can be led by certain motives without even being aware of them. As mentioned above, the “I”-procedure will lend a greater directness and verisimilitude to a story.¹¹ The effect seems to be that the author/narrator is drawn as closely as possible to the reader and the convincingness of the story is maximalized. The other device, the frame, has the opposite effect: that of removing the author from the reader, putting up a screen between them. It seems as if the author “pushes his responsibilities further and further away from himself”, as Percy Lubbock put it: “this is not my story, says the author: you know nothing of me.”¹²

Other reasons for using the frame structure include the author's wish to stylize, to embellish a story by providing it with an extra dimension; and his wish to write in the hero's own language, to render the speech of a person who does not use the regular literary language, but a dialect, an argot, children's language, or who speaks with a foreign accent. That is certainly a reason why Turgenev's contemporary Nikolaj Leskov so frequently used the device. In Turgenev's case this does not seem a strong motivation. It is true, the narrator of “Sobaka” has a parlance that is somewhat more juicy and jovial than Turgenev usually put into the mouths of his heroes from the landowning class; and the pope Aleksej, in “Rasskaz otca Alekseja”, tells his story, as he announces in the framing text, in his own simple words. However, by and large all Turgenev's heroes talk just like Turgenev wrote: a grammatically and stylistically impeccable and well constructed Russian. Of course, where Turgenev introduces a peasant, he will let him speak in his own way; Hirschel in the story “Žid” speaks with Jewish particularities, and the words of Pantaleone in Vešnie vody are interspersed with Italian. But if we take the main characters, and particularly the narrators in his shorter prose, they express themselves, as a rule, in Turgenev's own language; their usage of language can therefore not have been a compelling reason to avail himself of the frame device.

More momentous than all this was, in all likelihood, the literary tradition of which he was part and which he followed. As was indicated above, Turgenev did not invent the novella-with-frame, it was widely used before him—in fact, the novella as a literary genre was born with the frame structure: generated by Boccaccio, further developed by Chaucer etc. In Germany, the habit of clothing a story (novella) in a frame was very general; only after Goethe this form became less stereotyped, but it was by no means totally abandoned. Theodor Storm wrote his “Immensee” and several other works as frame stories. Turgenev, during the years he lived in Germany, met Storm and read and admired his writings. Likewise, in France he knew and appreciated Prosper de Mérimée, whose novella “Carmen” had the frame structure. Even more important may have been the literary tradition in which Turgenev was brought up. It is characteristic that some of the most famous and influential love stories of the late 18th and early 19th centuries all had the frame form: “Manon Lescaut” by l'abbé Prévost, Goethe's “Leiden des jungen Werthers”, Richardson's “Pamela” and “Clarissa Harlowe”, Benjamin Constant's “Adolphe”. Some of these consist of framed letters. “Adolphe”, “une anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d'un inconnu”, deeply impressed many Russians. By its theme (the tragedy of a love which extinguishes) and its atmosphere it is undoubtedly related to Turgenev's work and must have influenced him. In his dealing with the love theme, he continued preromantic and romantic traditions in form and fabula, spirit and style.

Aside from these international literary factors, however, there is the factor of personal disposition. Some writers are by nature more frank and unreserved, others more inhibited. Turgenev was not a person who would easily expose himself, either in daily life or as an author. Doesn't Henry James tell us that Turgenev would sometimes blush like a sixteen year old boy? From his correspondence, even with intimate friends, it also appears that he would be very careful not to exceed certain sexual and other decency norms. A certain prudery may well have contributed to his endeavor to erect screens between him and the reader. The class conventions and precepts in middle-19th century Russia were pretty rigorous: traditions, habits, decency rules played an important role in social life. And Turgenev was not a revolutionary in the realm of morals, not somebody to snap his fingers at all taboos. In European literature, certainly including Russian literature, it was not yet generally acceptable to delve deep into erotic questions in literary works, even though the romanticists had brought the individual emotional element and psychological analysis into the depiction of love.

If he nevertheless wanted to describe love, the most intimate human feelings, relations and situations, perhaps partly experienced by himself, he could do that no better than by writing in the first person and therewith stressing the personal and intimate character of the narrative, but at the same time, in order to avoid a shameful feeling and to keep a certain distance, by indicating that it was not he himself, but somebody totally different. This is no demonstrable truth, but a hypothesis which seems almost to force itself upon the reader of stories like Asja or First Love. And it would at least to a certain extent explain the fact that Turgenev so strikingly often applied a definite pattern or scheme (that of the company and the narrator). One could object, of course, that there are a few frame stories in which love does not play a role (“Sobaka”) or a very subordinate one (“Stepnoj korol' Lir”), so they would not require the frame. On the other hand, one might object, there are a few stories that do have the erotic element but are missing the encompassing frame (like “Zatiš'e” or “Klara Milič”), or that are framed love stories, but do not have the first person narration (Vešnie vody). But we do not propose an absolute rule, just a tendency; it would be strange and contradict Turgenev's many-sidedness if he would have moulded all his shorter prose works in exactly identical forms.

When the inner story is relatively slight or merges with the dominating frame, our hypothesis does not apply; the function of the inner story may then be to give a character some background, to clarify a situation or somebody's action, or sometimes just to vivify or retard the action. To heighten the interest, to make the story more colorful, Turgenev had, of course, more means at his disposal. One of his typical methods is to start out with an extensive description of the surroundings in which the action is going to take place, and subsequently of the dramatis personae—a description not always indispensable for our understanding of the course of events (in “Brigadir”, for example). The counterpart of this lengthy, leisurely introduction is his urge to inform us about the lives of his protagonists after the story or novel is finished—as if he is unable to take leave of them, as if an urge for completeness makes it impossible for him to suddenly leave them alone, without communicating anything about their further lot. Perhaps he was of the opinion that the reader, who was so intensively engaged in the lives of these heroes, has the right (and must have the desire) to learn about their later fortunes. “I konec?”, sprosit, možet byt', neudovletvorennyj čitatel'. “A čto že stalos' potom s Lavreckim? S Lizoj?”—that's how he starts the brief epilogue to Dvorjanskoe gnezdo, and similar words are used in the epilogue to Otcy i deti. This phenomenon is, of course, not restricted to Turgenev—it has to do with the quiet flow and elaborateness of 18th-19th century prose and of life in general in those times. All Turgenev's novels (with the exception of Nov') possess—each in its own way—such a “perspectivistic” ending. But epilogues appear also in his shorter works. Strangely enough, he has one even in his very first play, “Neostorožnost'” (1843): it ends with a separate scene that takes place “ten years after”, with its own decoration etc., in which only two short sentences are being pronounced. Virtually all his novellas are “epilogical”. Even when a correspondence is rendered (“Perepiska”, “Faust”), the last letter has a conclusive, more or less philosophical character. In “Tri vstreči” and “Jakov Pasynkov”, one might say the whole last chapter serves as an epilogue. In “Bretter”, which climaxes toward the end with a duel of the two male heroes (and a duel is a very common apogee in many stories), during which the bretter (fighter) kills the tragic hero Kister—Turgenev cannot refrain from adding a last sentence: “Maša … vse ešče živet”—a sentence which seems, at least to us, modern readers, an anticlimax after the dramatic finale and could better have been left out.

In short, frames and epilogues, together with nature descriptions and milieu evocations, personal portraits and biographies, interpolated addresses to the reader of a general, philosophical or contemplative nature, belong to Turgenev's stock of attributes which he used to build up and clothe the skeleton of his works and to make them more appealing, livelier and more personal.

Notes

1. In the edition I. S. Turgenev, Sobranie sočinenij, 11 vols., Moskva: Pravda, 1949.

2. See Joseph Kunz, ed., Novelle. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968, p. 4.

3. Quoted by Arnold Hirsch, Der Gattungsbegriff “Novelle”. Berlin: E. Ehering, 1928, p. 42.

4. Cf. G. B. Kurljandskaja, Struktura povesti i romana I. S. Turgeneva 1850-ch godov. Tula: Priokskoe kn. izdatel'stvo, 1977, p.3.

5. Hans Hermann Malmede, Wege zur Novelle, Theorie und Interpretation der Gattung Novelle … Stuttgart, 1966, p. 155.

6. Ibid.

7. Joseph Kunz, op.cit., pp. 229-231.

8. Ibid., pp. 10-14.

9. Reinhold Trautmann, “Turgenjew als Novellist”, a valuable text for this theme; in his Turgenjew und Tschechow, Leipzig: Volk und Buch Verlag, 1948, p. 21.

10. G. B. Kurljandskaja, op.cit., pp. 229-231.

11. Cf. T. Eekman, “The ‘Frame Story’ in Russian Literature and A. P. Čechov”, Signs of Friendship, To Honour A. G. F. van Holk …, ed. J. J. van Baak, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984, p. 404.

12. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931, p. 147.

13. Of course, not every reader is equally charmed by Turgenev's shorter prose works: Vladimir Nabokov thought that “As a story-teller, he is artificial and even lame … His literary genius falls short on the score of literary imagination.” (In his essay “Turgenev”, Lectures on Russian Literature, New York-London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981, p. 70).