Turgenev often ridiculed in his novels the Russian Anglo-maniac; but in one respect he was more English than the English themselves. This is seen in his passion for shooting. Nearly all of his trips to Britain were made solely for this purpose, and most of the distinguished Englishmen that he met, like Tennyson, he met while visiting England for grouse. Shooting, to be sure, is common enough in Russia; it appears in Artsybashev's "Sanin," and there was a time when Tolstoi was devoted to this sport, though it later appeared on his long blacklist. But Turgenev had the passion for it characteristic only of the English race; and it is interesting to observe that this humane and peace-loving man entered literature with a gun in his hand. It was on his various shooting excursions in Russia that he obtained so intimate a knowledge of the peasants and of peasant life; and his first important book, "A Sportsman's Sketches," revealed to the world two things: the dawn of a new literary genius, and the wretched condition of the serfs. This book has often been called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of Russia; no title could be more absurd. In the whole range of literary history, it would be difficult to find two personalities more unlike than that of Turgenev and Mrs. Stowe. The great Russian utterly lacked the temperament of the advocate; but his innate truthfulness, his wonderful art, and his very calmness made the picture of woe all the more clear. There is no doubt that the book became, without its author's intention, a social document; there is no doubt that Turgenev, a sympathetic and highly civilised man, hated slavery, and that his picture of it helped in an indirect way to bring about the emancipation of the serfs. But its chief value is artistic rather than sociological. It is interesting that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "A Sportsman's Sketches" should have appeared at about the same time, and that emancipation in each country should have followed at about the same interval; but the parallel is chronological rather than logical.* *There is an interesting and amusing reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe in the fourth chapter of "Smoke."