Andrew Blackman

Continuing my journey through Russian literature: if you want to see the introduction and reviews of earlier stories, click here.

Bobok by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not my favourite Dostoevsky, this one. It’s quite a funny little story about a man who goes to a graveyard and hears the dead people talking to each other in their graves. There’s some good satire about people’s social pretensions – although you’d think it wouldn’t matter any more, the dead people are still very concerned with rank and status and impressing other people. But nothing really happens in the story, apart from some entertaining dialogue. If I’d read this first, I probably wouldn’t have tried anything else by him, and would have missed out on some of my favourite novels.

God Sees the Truth, But Waits by Count Lev Tolstoy

Interesting to read in the introduction that Tolstoy believed towards the end of his life that the only purpose of art was to provide moral instruction, and picked out this story as one of only two examples of his own work that he still considered “good art”. It concerns a merchant, Aksyonov, who is wrongly accused of murder and theft, and is sent to penal servitude in Siberia. Twenty-six years later, the man who really committed the crime arrives in the same prison, and Aksyonov has to decide whether he wants to take vengeance or to forgive. Given what I said about moral instruction, you can probably guess which path he takes. I don’t really agree with Tolstoy that “good art” has to instruct in such an obvious way, but still I liked this story and the message conveyed by its ending.

The Steel Flea by Nikolai Leskov

The story uses the “skaz” style, in which the story is told through a particular character and using his own speech patterns, even though it’s in the third person. So there are lots of malapropisms and language jokes here, along with a story about Russian artisans trying to out-craft their English counterparts. The English have devised a dancing steel flea so small that its movements can only be seen through a “nitroscope” (microscope), and the Russians try to outdo them by putting shoes on the flea. The malapropisms must have been hard to translate, and maybe they work better in the original Russian because they either irritated me or made me cringe here. And the story went on too long, with the Russian artisan Lefty going to England, coming back, getting arrested, etc etc. Quite funny in the end to say that Lefty had discovered a secret of gun manufacture that, if he could have communicated it to the Tsar, would have made the Crimean War take a different turn. But in general not a story or a style that I enjoyed very much.

In the Cart by Anton Chekhov

This reminded me of Turgenev’s The Knocking – another long cart journey along bad country roads, and the story rumbling on as slowly and sporadically as the wheels of the cart. It seemed like more of a character sketch than a story, as there’s no real progression or development or even a plot, apart from going to town and going back again. While the barrier is down at a railway crossing, Marya Vasilyevna has a dream that her father and mother are still alive, and her humiliating life as an isolated rural schoolteacher never happened. It’s quite a convincing depiction of character, and quite moving in a way, but I felt that something was lacking. I’ve read other stories by Chekhov that I liked a lot more than this one.

The Monster by Lidiya Zinovyeva-Annibal

The first female writer, appearing around 1900. I liked this story a lot, as it evokes a child’s experience growing up and losing some of her innocence. Vera collects some water from a bog, and loves to watch the little tadpoles growing. There are some wonderful, tender descriptions of the tadpoles “being born and swimming to freedom; lethargic, kind, soft all through and amusingly slow, despite the ardour of their broad, dapper, waving tails. They knocked awkward heads with a kind of trust and muddle-headedness; their muslin tails got entangled with each other. I loved them tenderly.” The tadpoles are innocent, like children, and Vera watches them becoming bigger but also inexplicably fewer. Then she sees the ugly grub that she calls the “monster”, and realises that it is eating the tadpoles. Her brother tells her “That’s nature. A normal person gets used to nature.” But Vera cannot get used to it, says “I don’t know what to make of it.” People tell her to throw out the grub, but she can’t. She can’t kill it. She watches helpless as it eats her beloved tadpoles. I thought this was a great depiction of how hard it is for a child to grow up and accept some of the things that adults see as “normal”. It’s easy to forget that a lot of things did not seem at all normal at one time, and this story is a really good reminder of that.

Andrew Blackman Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Lidiya Zinovyeva-Annibal, Nikolai Leskov chekhov, dostoevsky, leskov, Lidiya Zinovyeva-Annibal, russian literature, short stories, tolstoy

Dostoevsky is one of my favourite writers. I discovered him in my teenage years, read as many of his books as I could get my hands on, and to be honest haven’t read anything else by him in a long time. I still count him as one of my favourite writers, though, more on memory than anything else. His writing is so urgent and immediate, and began to open up a world for me beyond 1990s South London.

The Gentle Spirit is very short – longer than a short story, but barely long enough to be called a novella. Because of this, it doesn’t have the grand scale of Dostoevsky’s longer works. But it does succeed in its aim – to get inside the head of a pawnbroker as he watches his dead wife laid out on the table in front of him, the wife that he has recently driven to suicide.

The language reflects the disordered state of the character’s mind as he tries to understand what has happened. He asks questions, changes his mind, berates himself for going too fast or too slow or missing the point, and is always alternating between self-justification and self-flagellation. It’s a convincing portrait.

The wife’s character is not so clear, but in a way that’s the point. The pawnbroker did not understand her – still doesn’t, really. Because we see the world entirely through his eyes, our view is very limited and distorted. His wife is the “gentle spirit” of the book’s title, much younger than he is and perhaps a little naive in her expectations of him, but beyond that we discover little about her.

Even the pawnbroker’s own motives are not very clear – he decided from the start of the marriage to be “stern” with her and to withhold love and affection, but the only reason given for this is that it’s what he was used to from his job – a pawnbroker has to be stern with his customers, and not allow himself to be emotionally involved in their plight. Perhaps Dostoevsky is saying that after cutting himself off from people in this way for so many years, he was unable to achieve intimacy with another human being. By the time he does realise his mistake and declare his love for her, it is too late and too extreme – after months of not speaking to her at all, he suddenly throws himself at her feet and tells her everything. Whereas at the beginning she would have welcomed this display of love, after everything she’s been through it just frightens her and drives her away from him.

This was a quick and enjoyable read, and was probably the right length – because of the limitations of the pawnbroker’s perspective, it might be tough to read a whole novel based inside his head. In this short book, though, the style worked very well, and although I didn’t really understand either character very well, they felt real to me. Now I feel inspired to go back and re-read some of those novels I loved all those years ago.

Andrew Blackman Fyodor Dostoevsky 19th century, dostoevsky, gentle spirit, russian literature