Modernism's Poetic-Realist Inheritance: Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches and Jean Toomer's Cane

Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman 's Sketches was a source of admiration and inspiration for modernist pioneers of the short-story cycle sub-genre, like Joyce, Anderson, and Hemingway. The American nativist author Jean Toomer – who was deeply influenced by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg – described himself as being an ‘essentialist’ and ‘a poetic realist’. This essay examines whether Toomer's modernist aesthetics align with Turgenev's, alongside those championed by the German literary movement of Poetic Realism, and will make the case that the 1923 modernist short-story cycle, Cane, directly drew inspiration from the Russian collection of stories, A Sportsman's Sketches.