SOURCE: Eekman, Thomas. “Turgenev and the Shorter Prose Forms.” In Text and Context: Essays To Honor Nils Åke Nilsson, edited by Peter Alberg Jensen, Barbara Lönnqvist, Fiona Björling, Lars Kleberg, and Anders Sjöberg, pp. 42-52. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987.

In the following essay, Eekman discusses the recurring love theme in Turgenev's short stories as well as his repeated use of first person narrators and framed story-within-a-story structural devices.

Few books in world literature have such a misleading title as Turgenev's Zapiski ochotnika. The actual hunting is restricted to just a few paragraphs, and usually the narrator, before he has caught even one woodcock, has arrived at some country house or somewhere else where he meets people, whose outward appearance and character he describes, whose life history he tells us and whose conversations he renders. No matter how important the function of nature is in his...