I will begin my story about the outstanding Master of the Word, born of Russian Earth, with one noteworthy episode. A case that he himself with warmth and gratitude more than once recalled. Two young artisans approached Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev at a small railway station and asked if the author of The Hunter's Notes was standing in front of them. Hearing an affirmative answer, they both bowed to his waist, saying that it was him - a bow from the whole Russian people (in the middle - the end of the XVIII century to know the summary of "Notes of the hunter" was a sign of good taste). Believe me, dear readers, this was not an impulsive act of young people at all. It was a deep demonstration of the personal role of the writer in the abolition of serfdom.
Let's move on to the characterization of the book. In the beginning, we note: at such a masterly level, only two people could write - with poetry in prose: Gogol and Turgenev. Revealing the brief content of “Notes of the hunter”, one should begin with the poetic and subtle Turgenev story “Pole and Kalinych”. His main idea is the inter-caste friendship of two people - the landowner and the serf, perhaps only possible in Russia. The calm, measured logic of the landowner Khorya is harmoniously complemented by Kalinych’s emotionality.
The main character of Turgenev, holding together the composition "Notes ...", is the enlightened landowner of the Oryol province in love with his small homeland . On behalf of this traveler through his native chernozem, Turgenev sets out “Notes of a Hunter”. The content of the stories is many-sided: either the hunter eavesdrops on the conversations of the boys who led the horses out into the night (“Bezhin Meadow”), then he reverently tells about a folk song that takes its soul (“Singers”), or it will share a secret - about an enlightened person who can be called the conscience of his native land , about God's wanderer Kasyan with Beautiful Swords.
Turgenev created so artistically perfect, and therefore beautiful, real images of peasants, bourgeois, and heterodox that he fell in love with an attentive reader, but at the same time, “Notes of a Hunter” is a true and lyrical book about the Russian people of the mid-19th century. Landownership was then the main form of farming. However, landowners who were modern for Ivan Sergeyevich were far from Catherine’s nobles (“Raspberry Water”) by their character and power charisma. Formulating a brief content of “Notes of the hunter”, we can say that serfdom in the 19th century completely exhausted itself. There wasn’t that scope, domestic landlords used to control nitpicking and punishment to control their slaves.
The serfs, in turn, are powerless. They can be easily offended, made unhappy, they cannot properly manage themselves and their lives. Not surprisingly, a deformed society, which turned people into slaves, deprived many serfs of social activity. A hopeless life often incited laborers to drunkenness, lies, laziness.
Often, housekeeping ended up on the shoulders of women, while men drank heavily. And when life became completely unbearable, stupid and cruel bloody riots broke out. The original name “Knocks!” Was given by the writer to one of his works. The idea of the risk of escalating violence in society is a summary of the story. The “notes of the hunter” are, as it were, ideologically summarized by the allegorical later story “Mumu”: the mighty mute people blindly obey the near, petty lord.
The Turgenevsky cycle of stories (finally published in 1852) played a prominent role in the liberation of the peasantry. Let us explain the last thought (after all, we already know the summary of the “Notes of the hunter”). Being a deep lyric poet, Ivan Sergeevich undoubtedly recognized his duty to society. Although Turgenev was not a lover of whipping, harsh vocabulary, denouncing petty landowners-tyrants, nevertheless, he displayed the cruelty, narrow-mindedness, moral bankruptcy of the landowners Zverkov, Stegunov, Penochkin in full. He used a more powerful weapon - a nagging, soul-taking truth. The above cycle of stories, as the chronicles testify, made a deep impression on the Russian emperor Alexander II who read it more than once. As you know, the people themselves gratefully called this king, who abolished serfdom, the Liberator.