A Sportsman's Sketches

A Sportsman's Sketches (also known as A Sportman's Notebook, The Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album) is an 1852 cycle of short stories by Ivan Turgenev. It was the first major writing that gained him recognition.

This work is part of the Russian realist tradition in that the narrator is usually an uncommitted observer of the people he meets.

This series of short stories revealed Turgenev's unique talent as a short story writer. Evidently it greatly influenced all Russian short story writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Anton Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Kuprin and many others.

Other world writers also admired Turgenev's style. Sherwood Anderson was particularly influenced by Turgenev's literature. He considered A Sportsman's Sketches to be a paradigm for his own short stories.

More recently, Turgenev has been criticized for his somewhat idealized characterization of muzhiks. Turgenev's muzhiks have been compared to other noble savages in 19th-century fiction (such as American Indians in works by J. F. Cooper). (wikipedia.org)