Turgenev's The Rendezvous

Ivan Turgenev, Herman Bernstein · Down to Earth Series · 11 pages

Turgenev's story The Rendezvous, from A Sportsman's Sketches, in Herman Bernstein's translation of 1907. It is one of the few pieces of pure fiction in this section, and it earns its place by what it shows rather than by anything it argues. The narrator is sitting in a birch grove in mid-September, in changeable weather, and the opening pages are given entirely to what he can hear — the rustle of leaves by which one can tell the season: not the gay laughing palpitation of spring, nor the lingering chatter of summer, nor the timid cold lisping of late autumn, but a barely audible drowsy prattle.

That patient attention to the grove is what makes the encounter it frames land as hard as it does. Concealed among the trees, the narrator witnesses a meeting between a peasant girl and the pampered valet of a rich landowner, who is leaving with his master and treats her devotion with a boredom he does not trouble to conceal. The cruelty of the title is entirely social and entirely ordinary — no violence, only a man who cannot be bothered — and the story ends with the narrator alone with what he has seen. Placed in a series whose other files argue about compassion in the abstract, it supplies the particular case.

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