Word: sportsman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...SPORTSMAN'S NOTEBOOK (398 pp.)-Ivan Turgenev, translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn - Chanticleer...
...that a stick with a piece of string on it makes a good fishing device, anglers have-been passionately perfecting their sport. Like latter-day bullfighters who prefer cape work to killing, many place more emphasis on form and finesse in handling tackle than on catching fish. When a sportsman goes this far, Fishing warns its readers, "he becomes a 'tackleist' instead of an angler . . . and tackle manipulation overshadows the true goal of using fishing equipment," i.e., fish in the creel or on a stringer...
Through A Sportsman's Notebook wanders a central character, a game hunter who is presumably Turgenev himself. Gradually he comes to know the masters and peasants, the clerks and traders of the neighborhood in which he shoots. The sketches begin and end on a hushed note, soft with the echoes of a summer day in the forest. Turgenev makes his points mutely rather than melodramatically...
...environment. And some of his best stories have nothing to do with serfdom: The Singers, a rousing account of a singing duel between a peasant and a tradesman which ends in a drunken debauch, and Bezhin Meadow, a tender portrait of a group of boys whom the sportsman meets one evening...
...ever teen able to match. He never imposes himself on his characters, never plays ricks on them or the reader. It is this tone of creative tact which so impressed two American storytellers, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, when they first looked for literary models. Anderson once called A Sportsman's Notebook "the sweetest thing in all literature."* If he exaggerated...