A Sportsman's Sketches

A Sportsman's is an 1852 cycle of short stories by Ivan Turgenev. It was the first major writing that gained him recognition.

This work is part of the Russian realist tradition in that the narrator is usually an uncommitted observer of the people he meets.

Turgenev based many of these short stories on his own observations while hunting at his mother's estate at Spasskoye, where he learned of the abuse of the peasants and the injustices of the Russian system that constrained them. The frequent abuse of Turgenev by his mother certainly had an effect on this work.

The stories were first published singly in The Contemporary before appearing in 1852 in book form. Turgenev was about to give up writing when the first story, "Khor and Kalinich", was well received. The work as a whole actually led to Turgenev's house arrest (part of the reason, the other being his epitaph to Nikolai Gogol) at Spasskoye.