Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, and Colonel Cantwell: Hemingway's Sportsman Sketches.

Nickel, Matthew

There is a scene in The Sun Also Rises that always strikes me as particularly humorous and poignant. Jake and Bill have just arrived in Burguete, up the road from Pamplona a week before the fiesta. It's cold in the mountains. Bill exclaims, "My God!... It can't be this cold to-morrow. I'm not going to wade a stream in this weather" (109). He then commences to play the piano to keep warm, and Jake observes the inn: "I sat at one of the tables and looked at the pictures on the wall. There was one panel of rabbits, dead, one of pheasants, also dead, and one panel of dead ducks. The panels were all dark and smoky-looking" (110). Jake then discovers the liquor, orders hot rum punch, and soon they eat their evening meal of fried trout, stew, and wild strawberries. The panels of dead rabbits, pheasants, and ducks always make me laugh--imagine your local Holiday Inn decorated with pictures of dead game. Jake's observation focuses this lighthearted hiking and fishing interlude between Paris and before the fiesta of Pamplona specifically on sport--hiking, hunting, fishing--Hemingway's own sportsman sketch. It is no coincidence that a few chapters later Jake reads from Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches and finds solace in the way Turgenev's "country became very clear" (147). This essay will examine the characters, landscapes, and technical resonances between Turgenev's and Hemingway's sportsman sketches in order to identify Hemingway's stylistic and substantive developments beyond the mere influence of the Russian writer. (1)

It is no secret: Hemingway's indebtedness to Ivan Turgenev was acknowledged by Hemingway himself in numerous letters and interviews throughout his lifetime. (2) To Archibald MacLeish in 1925, young Hemingway named Turgenev "the greatest writer there ever was" (Selected Letters 179); in "The Art of Fiction: Ernest Flemingway," an interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway named Turgenev (among many others) as one of his "literary forebears," whom he "learned the most from" (Bruccoli 118). Later in his life, Hemingway wrote to William Faulkner on 23 July 1947, claiming that he had "Beat Turgenieff--which we both did soundly and for time" (Selected Letters 624). He was fond of telling others the same, and the Russian writer is clearly present throughout much of his writing, including two of his titles, those of the short story "Fathers and Sons" and the satirical novel The Torrents of Spring. Noel Fitch documents Hemingway's library cards from Shakespeare & Company in those early Paris years, finding that "The author who appears most frequently on the library cards is Turgenev, whose A Sportsman's Sketches was the first book Hemingway remembered borrowing.... He [Hemingway] borrowed A Sportsman's Sketches four times in eight years.... nearly a fifth of the books he borrowed from the bookshop were Turgenev titles" (Fitch 166).

The influence of Turgenev on Hemingway's writing has been discussed by numerous scholars. (3) In his book-length study of the two writers, Myler Wilkinson examines their stylistic and thematic similarities: "For both Hemingway and Turgenev, form itself comes to define aesthetic reality. And aesthetic reality is the artist's transcription of both the personal and social world he lives in" (10). Wilkinson offers some insights into both writers; however, Wilkinson's thesis is based on an outdated argument that identifies Hemingway's main characters as nihilistic. He claims that Hemingway inherited Turgenev's hero Bazarov's cynicism and nihilism when he describes him as the man "who looks with disdain at the old order and awaits its collapse; the man who believes in nothing but direct sensory impressions" (19). A close look at most Hemingway stories reveals quite a different thrust: Flemingway's exemplary characters identify and live within rituals and traditions precisely to combat Modernity's affinity for solipsism and a belief in nothingness. After World War I, Hemingway found order through action and grace under pressure; in "the old thing," as he writes in The Sun Also Rises about Pedro Romero in the bullring (168), in European medieval cities throughout France, Spain, Italy; in the Catholic Church; in those rituals and traditions handed down from generation to generation and present through sports like hunting, fishing, and bullfighting. An examination of how Turgenev and Hemingway render sports reveals a profound mystery to the world, what becomes--at least for Hemingway--a kind of anti-nihilism. That which Hemingway developed from Turgenev was more aligned with what Michael Novak identifies when he describes how "sports flow outward into action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious: an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection" (19).

Hemingway achieves this radically religious impulse through landscape, and it is the "country" that Hemingway noted most often in his admiration for Turgenev. In Green Hills of Africa, he writes, "I was thinking how real that Russia of the time of our Civil War was, as real as any other place, as Michigan, or the prairie north of town and the woods around Evans's game farm, of how, through Turgenieff, I knew that I had lived there" (108). Hemingway was immersed in Turgenev during his apprentice years in Paris, and it is not hard to read the stories in In Our Time (1925) as sportsman's sketches themselves. Indeed, the stories that make up In Our Time (1925) seem to follow the form of Turgenev's A Sportman's Sketches, and the final story, "Big Two-Hearted River," certainly contains, as Edmund Wilson noted, "wood and water" reminiscent of "the transcriptions by Turgenev" (216-17).

While Hemingway was writing the first draft of "Big Two-Hearted River" in 1924, he was fishing around Roncevaux in the Pyrenees--in the same landscape Jake and Bill later fish in The Sun Also Rises. The country he wrote in and wrote about informed and infused his technique. About "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway writes to Edward O'Brien about how the story "is much better than anything I've done. What I've been doing is trying to do country so you don't remember the words after you read it but actually have the country" (The Letters of Ernest Hemingway 154). Consider this statement with his evocation of Turgenev in Green Hills of Africa: Russia was "as real as any other place" because, he writes, "of how, through Turgenieff, I knew that I had lived there." And it is one of the most real stories in American literature--those who have loved "Big Two-Hearted River" have also lived in Northern Michigan because of the way Hemingway describes the act of fishing with the place. We are with Nick under the smell of canvas, making coffee, opening apricots in the woods, wading the stream, caught in the unstopped grip of the biggest fish we've ever hooked, reeling heart-pounding until the line tightens, too much, and then gone, and the emptiness after with the final knowledge of tragedy in the swamp, for another day.

Hemingway's sportsman sketches emphasize not only place, as in Turgenev, but sacred space. His characters in sacred landscapes leave us with the mystery of grace, those sacramental moments tending toward the edge of all loss--often in the presence of death--which make possible the hope that we can indeed achieve greatness. Even in 1950 Hemingway follows the pattern of A Sportsman's Sketches, opening and closing his Venetian novel, Across the River and into the Trees, with duck hunting." The novel, a span of just a few days, leads up to and concludes with Cantwell's death. And like Turgenev's story "Lgov," in which the characters out duck hunting identify the single architectural presence of the landscape as a church, Hemingway centers Cantwell's morning duck hunting within the sacred terrain of Torcello, the church of Santa Maria Assunta--Saint Mary of the Assumption. The striking detail that makes Across the River differ from Turgenev's story is the overwhelming presence of death throughout Hemingway's novel. Cantwell will die. Thus, the spirit of place informs Cantwell's struggle to find redemption from the horrors of war before the end, and the act of hunting in the novel reflects Hemingway's pattern in writing sports rendered through ritual, what H. R. Stoneback identifies as a form of "redemptive ritual" and "prevenient grace" ("Holy Cross" 14-15). Sacred landscape frames the action in which sport transcends profane time: the writer must channel the deus loci, the spirit of place, for characters to attain that perfection which makes possible amazing grace.

Nick's quest into the woods, his "redemptive ritual," prepares us for Jake Barnes' fishing pilgrimage in The Sun Also Rises. The key textual link to Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, as noted earlier, is the fact that Jake reads from the stories to sober up in Chapter 14 of the novel. This chapter is a transition from the pre-fiesta tension to the explosion of San Ferm n, and it opens with Jake narrating how he left the group and returned to his room knowing he was "quite drunk" (147). To relieve his room-spinning drunkenness, he reads A Sportsman's Sketches, and he tells the reader: "I had read it before, but it seemed quite new. The country became very clear and the feeling of pressure in my head seemed to loosen. I was very drunk and I did not want to shut my eyes because the room would go round and round. If I kept on reading that feeling would pass" (147). In his line-by-line commentary on the novel, Stoneback focuses on how it is "Turgenev's country" that "matters most, that loosens the pressure," and acts as "the meditative landscape formula that informs the writing of country, of landscape, and of cityscape throughout The Sun Also Rises" (237). Hemingway does not tell us in the published text exactly what pages Jake rereads, but Stoneback reveals that Hemingway originally included: "one about a hunter, and another about 'two men fishing'" (Stoneback, Reading 237; Facsimile 2:396).

The manuscript of The Sun Also Rises reveals key details about the two stories. Hemingway's earlier draft described how Jake reads about a man who was out to shoot partridges in a wooded country. The country became very clear and the feeling of pressure in my head seemed to loosen and I went on in the story. Then I read another story in which there were two men fishing. One of them was a poacher and beggar and the other had been a general in the Army. (Facsimile 2:396)

The above provides some interesting resonances within The Sun Also Rises, and a close look at Turgenev's stories, particularly the partridge and grouse hunting stories and the fishing story reveals numerous echoes informing Hemingway's novel.

One notable similarity between A Sportsman's Sketches and The Sun Also Rises is the way both narratives frame the sport in country, place, interwoven with dialogue about matters other than sport. It almost seems that for Turgenev's narrator and for Jake and Bill, more time is spent on the scene and in conversation than participating in the act of hunting or fishing. This technique effectively enhances the action, the sport--thereby heightening moments of human imperfection--the lost fish, the nervous tremble, the missed shot--and those rare moments of grace when everything comes together for a clean kill or catch. Hemingway is certainly superior at creating the intensity of emotion for the reader, and his portrayal of Nick hooking the biggest trout he had ever seen or Romero with the bull gives the reader a longer lasting impression of the action itself. But what he clearly got from Turgenev is the landscape.

One landscape detail I have always enjoyed during the fishing trip in The Sun Also Rises--aside from the panels of dead rabbits and dead ducks--is the bowl of fresh strawberries Jake and Bill eat at the inn. Wild strawberries are veritable gifts of place, graces of the country, apparent only to the keenest sportsman attuned to the landscape. Turgenev mentions strawberries and partridge hunting in "Hor and Kalinitch"--quite likely one of the Turgenev stories Jake refers to in the manuscript. As Kalinitch "gathered strawberries" after hunting, he presented his bounty of "wild strawberries in his hands" (1:7, 13). Turgenev's narrator is surprised by this gesture, confessing that he "had not expected such a delicate attention on the part of a peasant" (1:13). Later Kalinitch is described as belonging "to the order of idealists and dreamers, of romantic and enthusiastic spirits" (1:13), a man of the earth, "of nature, of mountains and waterfalls" (1:16). Essentially, Kalinitch, the bearer of the berry, embodies a certain joy of the outdoor sportsman, and his presence in the hunting narrative--like the presence of many other hunting companions in Turgenev's sketches--is to foreground another key ingredient in sport: that of companionship or, in Hemingway's case, of communion.

I first encountered wild strawberries, or what in my mind I still call petites fraises des hois, on a fishing trip in the Catskills with H. R. "Stoney" Stoneback when I--like Kalinitch--presented him with a handful of strawberries. We had been discussing The Sun Also Rises and Jake's fishing, and we had compared Hemingway's narrative to John Burroughs' fishing tales. Burroughs was very important to Hemingway's generation--especially to those passionate about fishing, hunting, the natural world. Readers of Aethlon might be familiar with Stoneback's emphasis on the pilgrimage aspects of Burroughs' and Hemingway's fishing quests in his essay "Fishing With John Burroughs and Ernest Hemingway: 'Mere Wormers'? 'Trout-Hogs'? or Aficionados With a Code?" The natural leap from Hemingway and Burroughs is to Turgenev; there are numerous parallels between all three, especially when it comes to sporting quests. Thus, my fishing trip was part-Hemingway, part-Burroughs, and I would later come to find, part-Turgenev.

We started out fishing the head waters of the Rondout on Peekamoose, a stream John Burroughs praised by writing: "If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout" ("A Bed of Boughs" 152). I walked upstream, and through a meadow I first found wild strawberries trailing in the grass. In his essay "Strawberries," Burroughs writes: "The strawberry is always the hope of the invalid, and sometimes, no doubt, his salvation" (53). Burroughs couches strawberry picking in terms of a religious rite, with the sportsman like a "devotee before a shrine, or naming his beads, your rosary strung with luscious berries" (60-61). I could only think of Jake Barnes, that war-wounded veteran, healed by the sacred berry of place. The fishing interlude in The Sun Also Rises remains one of the most joyful and celebratory passages-alive with the sportsman's spirit evident in Turgenev's character Kalinitch and in what Burroughs emphasizes in his essays. It is no mere coincidence that Jake is a devotee, that he does pray in that church in Pamplona, feeling himself "a rotten Catholic" (97), before he makes his way to Roncevaux to fish. Jake, who participates in the fiesta, attends the religious processions, goes to confession and Mass during the fiesta, certainly knows about devotion.

Though this strawberry-Burroughs-Turgenev connection might seem tenuous, another look at Hemingway's manuscript reveals Jake picking strawberries on the walk to fish with Bill--a scene omitted in the published text. (5) Finally, Burroughs' essay concludes with his own observation of berry-pickers and his pivotal metaphor: he compares the best pickers to the best anglers, "Indeed, the successful berry-picker, like Walton's angler, is born, not made" ("Strawberries" 62). Burroughs' comparison of hunting strawberries and fishing for trout is apt and again points directly to Jake Barnes. Of course, strawberries are a fact of June trout fishing, and a berry might simply be a berry not a Burroughs. Still, the berry-Burroughs subtext informs Jake's and Bill's joyful companionship, their discussions of holiness and healing, love and salvation, after the sacred acts of trout fishing and strawberry picking.

One of the more striking recurrent patterns in both Turgenev's and Hemingway's sportsman sketches is the act of walking deep into country: as any sportsman knows, walking frames the action of sport, and walking through country is a form of meditation--an almost spiritual act that prepares one for the sport itself. Jake and Bill walk far across mountains to fish the Fdbrica, and the walking takes more time than the fishing. In Turgenev's "Byezhin Prairie," the narrator, out grouse shooting, describes for six pages walking through country on a "glorious July day" (1:133). Turgenev's opening to this story is like a hymn to the rising sun: "But, lo! the dancing rays flash forth again, and in solemn joy, as though flying upward, rises the mighty orb" (1:133). He proceeds to describe the entire morning, the arc of daylight in blue sky, the "horizon, a faint pale lilac" and the evening: the "crimson glow lingers long over the darkening earth" (1:134). The description of the country and sun rising would be an appropriate meditation for Jake Barnes in a novel called The Sun Also Rises. What follows in Turgenev is haunting, for after grouse hunting, the narrator wanders completely lost. He comments on the mystery of darkness and the void overwhelming, until he finds a camp fire, what he calls "the circle of light" (1:141). It is a strange story, a mysterious one, reverberating with the mystical aspects of The Sun Also Rises: the sun patterns, rising, falling, darkness, the haunting of memory, the strangeness of life and death.

"Kassyan of Fair Springs" by Turgenev, about hunting grouse in country, also echoes throughout the fishing expedition with Jake and Bill. It occurs in the heat of the day. Walking through fields, the narrator notices trees down, freshly cut (1:180). (6) After being guided by Kassyan, a strange mysterious man, Turgenev's narrator is forced under trees (1:181). He lies down and meditates on the sky moving through the branches overhead. Jake too comments about the heat, getting under trees, and after Jake and Bill fish, he lies down with his head "in the shade and looked up into the trees" (123). Turgenev's narrator meditates on the sweet occupation of lying on one's back, gazing upwards, and he comments: "One looks: the deep, pure blue stirs on one's lips a smile, innocent as itself; like the clouds over the sky, and, as it were, with them, happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul." His meditation draws him further into the heavens, toward the brightness of "that peaceful, shining immensity" (1:182). Hemingway's style omits such an elaborate description while keeping the emotional tension of Turgenev's sense when Jake tells us, "It felt good lying on the ground" (123).

One Turgenev story Hemingway suggested to MacLeish was "The Rattling of Wheels" in Volume 2 of A Sportsman's Sketches. In this sketch, also immersed in "country," the narrator exclaims how because they were driving through such beautiful country, he could not go to sleep: There were liberal, wide-stretching, grassy riverside meadows, with a multitude of small pools, little lakes, rivulets, creeks overgrown at the ends with branches and osiers--a regular Russian scene, such as Russians love, like the scenes amid which the heroes of our old legends rode out to shoot white swans and grey ducks. (2:261)

This landscape meditation is coupled with the affirmation that "life's sweet--one doesn't want to die" (2:261). A striking comment, resonant too throughout the driving scenes in The Sun Also Rises, especially when Jake, Bill, and Robert Cohn head south toward Pamplona. During one stretch through "ripe fields of grain," they pass "an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind" (93). Jake looks at Bill, a simple affirmation of the gorgeous country, but unlike those engaged with the place, unlike the narrator in Turgenev's story who is unable to fall asleep because of the beauty of the country, Robert Cohn is fast asleep. It is no wonder he does not go fishing with Jake and Bill, for he violates the sportsman's code--Cohn, the only self-proclaimed athlete in the book--unaware of the sweetness of life.

Finally, Turgenev's fishing story "Raspberry Spring"--one of those mentioned by Jake in the manuscript "in which there were two men fishing. One of them was a poacher and beggar and the other had been a general in the Army"--portrays further thematic intersections with Hemingway's novel. For instance, the beggar in Turgenev fishes with worms--Jake too fishes with worms. In the published text, Bill calls Jake "a lazy bum" for fishing with live bait and not flies. In the manuscript, Hemingway originally had Bill call him "a lazy beggar" (my emphasis, The Sun Also Rises 121; Facsimile 2:329). Coincidence? Probably not. Then, Turgenev's characters discuss the old Count Piotr Hitch, a "rich grandee of the olden time, renowned for his hospitality" (1:46). He threw large parties, had "a kind heart" (1:50), he was a man who knew the value of things. Turgenev's description of Count Piotr Hitch echoes Hemingway's descriptions of Count Mippipopolous in The Sun Also Rises, a man who also exudes hospitality, a kind heart, generosity. If this is one of the stories Jake reads in Pamplona, it makes perfect sense then that after reading about Count Hitch, Jake himself thinks of values and morality, meditates on love, friendship, Lady Brett Ashley, getting what you paid for; he tells himself, "The world was a good place to buy in" (148). This all echoes Count Mippipopolous' key line in Chapter 7, when he tells Jake that the "secret" in life is to "get to know the values" (60). The count in Turgenev's story is ruined by a woman, "a vixen" who "simply bewitched" Count Hitch (1:50)--fair warning to Jake Barnes as he thinks less about Brett and participates more fully in the sacred and profane aspects of the fiesta, the bullfights, the country itself.

So why, when he clearly learned much from Turgenev, does Hemingway claim to Faulkner that he beat him "soundly and for time"? Was this just boasting? Maybe, but for Hemingway, what mattered in his stories, especially those about hunting and fishing and bullfighting, was the presence of death and the way humans can act with grace, which makes manifest the incarnational. Jake, that wounded veteran, knows a lot about death, and his fishing expedition occurs just beyond the town of Fabrica with the "extensive ruins of a large eighteenth- and nineteenth-century factory" that once manufactured firearms and munitions (Stoneback, Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises 211). Thus, even the fishing interlude, that idyllic and pastoral sportsman sketch, contains within it the shadow of death. (7) And in that shadow, Jake also knows the sacred space of his fishing expedition occurs within the terrain of Roland, that Christian knight, and in the light of thousands of pilgrims who have walked the same road for centuries on their way to Santiago de Compostela. (8)

That which is merely suggestive in Turgenev is foregrounded in Hemingway--the country is more than merely beautiful, and Hemingway's radically religious impulse through sacred landscapes and the fishing interlude prepares the reader for the tragedy of the bullring. Recall Death in the Afternoon: Hemingway describes the way a faena--the work of the bullfighter--done with true grace and artistry "takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy" (206). Jake learns much from Pedro Romero, possibly feels that "religious ecstasy," and the bullfight affirms through the art of ritual and action the transience of life. It is the presence of death which makes life sweeter, not just in a panel of dead rabbits or dead ducks, but in the possibility that one misstep in action can break apart the whole sequence of life and, therefore, that a well-made and beautiful act in one split second can redeem even the most "rotten" sinner.

Works Cited

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1986.

Burroughs, John. "A Bed of Boughs." Locusts and Wild Honey. 1879. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1924. 149-76.

--. "Strawberries." Locusts and Wild Honey. 1879. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1924. 53-64.

Cirino, Mark. "Beating Mr. Turgenev: 'The Execution of Tropmann' and Hemingway's Aesthetic of Witness." The Hemingway Review 30.1 (Fall 2010): 31-50.

Coltrane, Robert. "Hemingway and Turgenev: The Torrents of Spring." Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives. Ed. Susan F. Beegel. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1989. 149-61.

Fitch, Noel. "Ernest Hemingway--c/o Shakespeare and Company." Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1977): 157-81.

Hemingway, Ernest. Across the River and into the Trees. New York: Scribner's, 1950.

--. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Scribner's, 1987.

--. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

--. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

--. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Volume 2 1923-1925. Eds. Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, Robert Trogdon. New York: Cambridge, 2013.

--. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner's, 1926.

--. The Sun Also Rises: A Facsimile Edition. 2 vols. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990.

Lisca, Peter. "The Structure of Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees." Modern Fiction Studies 12 (1966): 232-50. Rpt. in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda Wagner. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 1974. 288-306.

Nickel, Matthew C. Hemingway's Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway. Wickford, RI: New Street Communications, 2013.

Novak, Michael. The loy of Sports: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit. Revised Edition. 1976. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 1994.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. 1989. New York: Norton, 1999.

Stoneback, H. R. "Fishing with John Burroughs and Ernest Hemingway: 'Mere Wormers'? 'Trout Hogs'? or Aficionados with a Code?" Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 9.2 (Spring 1992): 53-65.

--. "Holy Cross 33--Yale 6: Sport, Ritual, and Religion in Hemingway." Aethlon 6.2 (Spring 1989): 11-19.

--. Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2007.

Taylor, Wilford Dunaway. "A Shelter from The Torrents of Spring." French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. Eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jackson R. Bryer. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 101-19.

Turgenev, Ivan. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev: A Sportsman's Sketches. 2 vols. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann, 1906.

Notes

(1.) A version of this essay was first delivered at the Sport Literature Association Conference in Johnson City, TN, June 2015, and this current version deliberately retains some signs of its oral presentation.

(2.) Hemingway read and talked about Turgenev quite frequently in his early apprentice years in Paris (Reynolds 12, 106, 254, 333, 341).

(3.) For more comparisons between Turgenev and Hemingway see the following: Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow looks briefly at Turgenev's influence on Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." George Wickes, in "Ernest Hemingway Pays His Debts," identifies Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches as an integral influence structurally on Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Myler Wilkinson's Hemingway and Turgenev: The Nature of Literary Influence examines stylistic parallels between the Russian and Hemingway. Other critics such as Robert Coltrane and Wilford Dunaway Taylor have looked more closely at Turgenev's influence on Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring. And Mark Cirino's "Beating Mr. Turgenev: 'The Execution of Tropmann' and Hemingway's Aesthetic of Witness" examines the witness of death in Turgenev and Hemingway.

(4.) Peter Lisca connects Hemingway's Venetian novel to Turgenev's On the Eve, but he does not consider closely the aspects of hunting in Hemingway's novel to that in Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches.

(5.) Hemingway originally wrote: "We picked some wild strawberries that were growing on the sunny side of the ridge in a little clearing in the trees" (Facsimile 2:320). Stoneback explains that the omission of that detail--picking the strawberries--"forces the reader to participate in the action" (Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises 209).

(6.) Much of this scene echoes throughout another later Nick Adams story, "The Last Good Country." Nick in the story also goes out, like Turgenev's hunter, to hunt grouse in the heat of day (The Complete Short Stories 515, 540).

(7.) Mark Cirino's examination of witness in Turgenev and Hemingway closes in on this fact of death. His essay emphasizes how Turgenev turns his head at death--cannot witness an execution--whereas Hemingway, like Dostoevsky, is compelled to witness death.

(8.) Readers unaware of the pilgrimage subtext of The Sun Also Rises should consult Stoneback's seminal work on the matter, Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (134-39, 188-96). Also see Nickel, Hemingway's Dark Night (60-85).

Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.