THE STORY: The place is the country estate of the Islayevs, a wealth Russian family, the time the middle of the nineteenth century. It is summer, and the lives of the family and their entourage reflect the bored indolence so characteristic of the a

HOR AND KALINITCH Anyone who has chanced to pass from the Bolhovsky district into the Zhizdrinsky district, must have been impressed by the striking difference between the race of people in the province of Orel and the population of the province of Kaluga. The peasant of Orel is not tall, is bent in figure, sullen and suspicious in his looks; he lives in wretched little hovels of aspen-wood, labours as a serf in the fields, and engages in no kind of trading, is miserably fed, and wears slippers of bast: the rent-paying peasant of Kaluga lives in roomy cottages of pine-wood; he is tall, bold, and cheerful in his looks, neat and clean of countenance; he carries on a trade in butter and tar, and on holidays he wears boots. The village of the Orel province (we are speaking now of the eastern part of the province) is usually situated in the midst of ploughed fields, near a water-course which has been converted into a filthy pool. Except for a few of the ever-accommodating willows, and two or three gaunt birch-trees, you do not see a tree for a mile round; hut is huddled up against hut, their roofs covered with rotting thatch…. The villages of Kaluga, on the contrary, are generally surrounded by forest; the huts stand more freely, are more upright, and have boarded roofs; the gates fasten closely, the hedge is not broken down nor trailing about; there are no gaps to invite the visits of the passing pig…. And things are much better in the Kaluga province for the sportsman. In the Orel province the last of the woods and copses will have disappeared five years hence, and there is no trace of moorland left; in Kaluga, on the contrary, the moors extend over tens, the forest over hundreds of miles, and a splendid bird, the grouse, is still extant there; there are abundance of the friendly larger snipe, and the loud-clapping partridge cheers and startles the sportsman and his dog by its abrupt upward flight.

Turgenev was a major 19th century Russian novelist. His novel Fathers and Sons is his best-known work. Published in 1852 this collection of stories is also known as Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album. The stories are based on Turgenev's experiences hunting on this mother's estate. While on these tripe he learned about the abuse suffered by the Russian peasants and the injustice of the Russian system. These stories along with his epitaph to Gogol led to his house arrest. Stories in this work include: Khor and Kalinych:, Yermolay and the Miller's Wife:, Raspberry Water, District Doctor:, My Neighbor Radilov, Famer Ovsyanikov:, Lgov:, Bezhin Lea:, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands:, Bailiff:, The Office, Loner:, Two Landowners, Lebedyan, Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew:, Death, Singers, Pyotr Petrovich Karataev, Meeting. Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District: . Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin: The End of Chertopkhanov: Living Relic: The Clatter of Wheels: Forest and Steppe: T he Russian German, and The Reformer and the Russian German.