How to Hide Your Style
Re-reading Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Notebook"
Our book today is Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, in the 1992 Charles and Natasha Hepburn translation for the stylish Everyman’s Library lineup of the time. The book began life as a series of sketches Turgenev wrote for a Russian literary magazine from 1847 to 1851, and their evocative simplicity made them popular enough so that Turgenev kept writing them, bringing out an enlarged collection of these sketches in 1874 and establishing a reputation among other famous Russian writers (not always reciprocated; Dostoevsky mocked him, and Tolstoy, although guardedly friendly in correspondence, was open in thinking of him as something of a lightweight).
