Notes of a Hunter

In September 1846, the literary and socio-political journal «Sovremennik», founded by A. S. Pushkin, changed owners — Pushkin's successor Pyotr Alexandrovich Pletnev rented the journal to Nikolai Alexeyevich Nekrasov and Ivan Ivanovich Panayev. The new editorial board, aiming to attract the best literary forces of those years, turned to Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev — with a request to provide fresh material for the «Miscellanies» section.

Turgenev, who spent the summer and part of autumn 1846 at his mother's estate Spasskoye-Lutovinovo and regularly went hunting accompanied by the local gamekeeper Afanasiy Alifanov, gladly responded to the publishers' request and wrote for the first issue of the revamped journal the story «The Ferret and Kalinich», published in the January 1847 edition with the subtitle proposed by Panayev: «From the Notes of a Hunter».

Thus, the first of the cycle of stories and sketches saw the light, about which Saltykov-Shchedrin would later say that they «laid the foundation for a whole literature focused on the people and their needs» and, along with other works by Turgenev, significantly raised the «moral and intellectual level of the Russian intelligentsia». In the mid-19th century, the struggle for the abolition of serfdom was at the center of progressive domestic thought; Turgenev's truthful depiction of the life of contemporary Russian society, primarily its social underclass, appeared just in time and made a profound impression on all empathetic people. For Turgenev himself, dissatisfied with his own literary activities of those years, the unexpected success became a turning point in his creative biography, instilling confidence in his abilities and evoking an unstoppable desire to continue working.

In January 1847, Ivan Sergeyevich went abroad for three and a half years; it was abroad, during the European anti-feudal and national liberation revolutions of 1848-1849, that almost all subsequent works of the cycle were written. As they became ready, they continued to be published in «Sovremennik», and in 1852 twenty-two of them under the general title «Notes of a Hunter» (three more stories would later be added to the collection) were finally published as a separate book. Vladimir Lvov, the official of the Moscow censorship committee who permitted the printing of the collection, was dismissed, yet the book went on sale. The prohibitions on the publication of «Notes of a Hunter» were finally lifted a few years later when the government finally decided to proceed with the abolition of serfdom.