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I bought this for the cover art. I love everything about Jevgraf Fiodorovitch Krendovsky's 1836 painting Preparations for Hunting (in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). The calm, subdued, but rich color palette, the glances the young hunters, and the young boy on the left, are giving each other, the angles of arms and legs, the devoted hunting dog with its paw on its master's leg, the attention to details of fashion and outerwear. It many ways it's a perfect choice for cover art for the book (so much cover art is incomprehensibly ill-matched). These sketches by Turgenev almost all begin with a hunter setting out on a hunt, with a hunting companion or alone, on his horse or in some kind of cart or carriage, with his hunting dog. And the hunting going on here is an upper class pursuit. We can tell from the painting that that's an upper class residence, upper class young men. When the lower classes "hunt," it's usually called poaching, because hunting involves land, and landowners, and private property. So when Turgenev's first person narrator goes out hunting in one sketch, and the landowner confronts him and asks him what he's doing, the situation quickly resolves because they're two aristocrats and the aristocratic privilege to hunt is extended from one landowner to another.

As Richard Freeborn's excellent introduction explains, hunting is the pretext for these sketches. What they're really about, which the Russian government understood because it exiled Turgenev to his estate after the Sketches were published, is the terrible conditions of serfdom and servitude in Russia. Every sketch contains some poor wretch who is cold, hungry, or orphaned, or whose master won't allow him or her to get married, or won't sell her to a man who wants to marry her (!), or some serf being administered a beating by the landowner's bailiff, or some woman being beaten by some man, and most of them contain unhappy dogs who are never fed or burrow into the ground from cold and hunger.

In spite of the subject matter, Turgenev maintains a certain calm distance from it. I wouldn't say there's a consistent tone of irony throughout, but occasionally irony is put to brilliant use, as in this passage from the first sketch, "Khor and Kalinych:"

While out hunting in the Zhizdra region I became acquainted with a small Kaluga landowner, Polutykin, also a passionate hunter and, consequently, an excellent fellow. Admittedly, he had acquired one or two weaknesses: for instance, he paid court to all the rich young ladies of marriageable age in the province and, being refused both their hands and admission to their homes, confessed his grief heartbrokenly to all his friends and acquaintances while continuing to send the young ladies' parents gifts of sour peaches and other raw produce from his garden; he was fond of repeating one and the same anecdote which, despite Polutykin's high opinion of its merits, simply failed to make anyone laugh; he was full of praise for the works of Akim Nakhimov and the story Pinna; he had a stammer; he called his dog Astronomer; instead of however he used to say howsoever, and he introduced in his own house a French cuisine, the secret of which, according to his cook's ideas, consisted in completely altering the natural taste of each dish: in the hands of this culinary master meat turned out to be fish, fish became mushrooms, and macaroni ended up dry as powder; moreover, no carrot would be permitted in a soup that had not first assumed a rhomboidal or trapezoidal shape. But apart from these minor and insignificant failings Polutykin was, as I've said, an excellent fellow.

There is fantastic anthropomorphizing, especially of dogs. Astronomer, referred to above, is accompanying the narrator and some peasants on a cart ride:

"Let Astronomer be seated!" exclaimed Polutykin pompously.

Fedya, not without a show of pleasure, lifted the uneasily smiling dog into the air and deposited it on the floor of the cart.

In another sketch a landowner is attempting to teach his poodle the ABCs, which the dog unhappily refuses to learn. "He gave the dog a shove with his foot. The wretched dog rose up calmly, let the bread drop off its nose and walked away, deeply offended, into the hallway literally on tip-toe. And with good reason: here was a stranger come to visit for the first time and look how they treated him!"

Turgenev's other strengths on display here are his wonderful powers of description, both of physical environments and people. No character is introduced without a complete rundown of his appearance, including hair, face, figure, and clothes. The novel's realism makes it a valuable historical document.