ABSTRACT
The appearance of the first translations of Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches in English at the height of the Crimean War signalled a moment of political conflict and symbolised one of cultural convergence. Anti-Russian feeling, endemic in England for a generation, gave rise to a propaganda campaign of jingoistic fervour. As one study of the war puts it, ‘even in the most moderate of circles . . . the war was welcomed as the culmination of an ideological struggle which had been going on for many years’ (Anderson 1967: 4). Consequently, there arose in the press and periodicals an urgent need for information about the domestic condition of an enemy whose external ambitions might be represented as an extension of internal repression and injustice. Among the variety of sources relating to Russia that appeared in England between 1853 and 1856 – some of them of doubtful provenance and authenticity – a French-language version of A Sportsman’s Sketches was published in English, in both book and extract form, between August 1854 and November 1855.1
Ironically, this introduction of Turgenev to England, in a climate of ignoble curiosity, also affords an example of that convergence of national literatures in the pan-European literary development of realism. For the 1850s are not just a decade of conflict between the European powers; they are also the years in which realism first emerges as a recognisable artistic movement across the continent. Culture, it appears, flows through channels unstoppable by the ideology of nationalism. Indeed, nationalism may even carry forward unwittingly those processes and values which it exists to deny.
