Catching Nature by the Tail

This chapter discusses the roots of Ivan Turgenev's nature philosophy. It discusses how Turgenev was able to assimilate a number of ideas from Goethe's and Schelling's thoughts on the natural world that became central figurations in Turgenev's own nature writing. The chapter describes Turgenev's early grounding in German Romantic nature philosophy and traces the development of his own conception of nature's indifference in relation to Alexander Herzen's thought on the subject. It then discusses Turgenev's ideal as a hunter writer, and how nature served as a guide and a model for him. The chapter proposes and explains the concepts of venatic equipoise, ecotropism, and anthropotropism as tools for analyzing Turgenev as a nature writer.