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the Minister of the Interior, but retired from the office
at the end of a year, to live the free life of a Russian
landed proprietor and huntsman.
He published his first hunting stories in 1847; then
followed from 1847 to 1851 the others, which in 1852
appeared collected as “Recollections of a Huntsman,” and
created an epoch-making sensation. He at first began
with things in verse like Byronisms and romanticisms,
unsuccessful and without originality. It was in this
first period that Alexander Herzen, as has been told me
by an eye-witness, called him so affected that he could
not eat without affectation. Byelinski tore him loose
from Byron, Heine, and the romanticists, and brought
him into the right path.
He expressed what he knew thoroughly: Russian
nature and the life of the Russian people, and gave
his hatred of serfdom expression in the forms which
the censor would allow. This certainly had a beneficial
effect on his talent, — developed, necessarily, everything
that was pre-eminent, aristocratic, and discreet in it. If
he sometimes, in his early youth, had an inclination to
the pathetic, to declamation, to glaring effects, —
pronounced it could have been under no circumstances, —
then the relation to the censor must have suppressed it.
To awaken a sympathy for the serfs, to show the lawlessness
in which they passed their lives, and give pictures
of the roughness which abused them even to death, —
and that without making use of the whip or knout, — he
relates incidents in his life as a sportsman, visits to the
landed proprietors or to the physicians, and among these,
now and then, little stories: of the miller’s wife who, as
a girl, had been guilty of a black ingratitude in wishing
to marry, although her angelic mistress could not endure
married servants, and who, when she would not give up
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