Here we move into the Stalinist era and writing about the Gulag. Through the Snow is a beautiful extended metaphor about writing as walking through virgin snow, with readers coming along behind [...]]]> The final part in my journey through Russian literature. For the original post in the series, please click here.

Varlam Shalamov

Here we move into the Stalinist era and writing about the Gulag. Through the Snow is a beautiful extended metaphor about writing as walking through virgin snow, with readers coming along behind on tractors and horses.

Berries is about prisoners being tempted by berries just on the other side of a line they are not allowed to cross. One of them crosses, and is shot dead. The guard comes up to the other one and says, ‘It was you I wanted. But you didn’t cross the line, you bastard.’ The details make it real – Shalamov did spend 15 years in Siberia for the crime of calling Ivan Bunin a “Russian classic”. So he knows how things work. After the prisoner is shot, the guard fires off a second shot. “There must always be two shots – the first is a warning.” The Snake Charmer deals with a writer’s predicament in jail: does he “pull novels” (i.e. re-tell famous stories to the prisoners) for extra soup, or is this the “ultimate humiliation”?

Duck is the best of the lot, sad and poetic, a story of doomed attempts at survival, not just from the starving duck with no strength to fly, but from the prisoner aiming to catch it and give it to the foreman so that he would be struck off the ominous “list” being drawn up, and also from the foreman himself who was hoping to give the duck to the superintendent, and also from the superintendent who was hoping to give the duck to the commandant. They all watch the starving man’s failed attempt to catch the starving duck, and they all realise it means their own death too, the extinguishing of their last chance to avoid the list.

What a Pity by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A woman, Anna Modestovna, is passing a newspaper displayed on the street when she notices a mention of her father, who long ago fell foul of the regime and has been in prison camps for decades. The story highlights the instability of reputations in those times, and how quickly someone could be denounced. In this case the journalist seems unaware that her father is disapproved of, and praises some work he did decades ago. She sees a chance to take the newspaper, and perhaps even to show it as proof that he is now approved of by the authorities, enough to be praised in an official newspaper. But a policeman passes by, and stealing a piece of newspaper could put her in even more serious trouble. It’s quite a simple story, but touches on a lot of important issues and gives an insight into the times.

In the Autumn by Vasily Shukshin

This is a very affecting tale of lost love and the passing of time. Filipp is in love with Marya as a young man, but she wants a church wedding and he is politically active and against such things. So the part ways and each marry someone else, but for the rest of his life he keeps thinking about Marya. Now, as an old man operating a ferry across the river, he realises one day that the people he is transporting are a funeral party, and the dead woman must be Marya. He realises the terrible mistake he made all those years ago, losing the woman he loved for something that seems completely unimportant now. You really feel the anguish and the lost years, and making Filipp a ferry operator is a nice echo of Charon ferrying dead souls across the Styx.

Red Caviar Sandwiches by Asar Eppel

An odd love story, set in the midst of squalor. The Pushkin student dorm is a horrible place, crumbling, stinking, mean and dirty. Even as a young man and woman are trying to get some privacy to consummate their unlikely love affair, Eppel is describing the stalagmites of frozen shit in the outdoor latrine. The contrasts of romance and squalor, of Pushkin and frozen shit, of red caviar sandwiches and a dirty old barracks room, are brilliantly done. It seems impossible that anything good could happen in those surroundings, but something good does happen, as it does everywhere.

The Officer’s Belt by Sergei Dovlatov

Quite an entertaining story about drunken craziness in an army barracks. Dovlatov has a natural story-telling style that draws you into the story and makes you follow it to the end. This one left me a little disappointed, though, wondering what it was all about really. It’s apparently part of a larger work called “The Suitcase”, in which Dovlatov writes about the history of each of the objects in the suitcase he left the Soviet Union with, so I could see it working as part of that – the bizarre series of coincidences that lead to one object being in a particular place and time. On its own, though, I enjoyed it but didn’t love it.

Sindbad the Sailor by Yury Buida

A strange, short but quite memorable story about a dying old woman who asks for all her papers to be burnt. The people burning them see that the papers consist entirely of the same Pushkin love poem written out over and over again every day for fifty years. The sad details of the woman’s life are only briefly described, but hint at why she may have taken refuge in this poem and written it out on 18,250 separate sheets of paper. It really made me think about the things we do to keep going, and the pointlessness of so much of it in the end. It was a nice story to end up with, referring back to Pushkin who started it all off with the very first story.

These three stories come from Babel’s posting as the equivalent of an embedded war correspondent with a Cossack regiment in Poland in 1920. They are not compromised or sanitised in any way, however: the convey the full savagery and horror not only [...]]]> For the original post in this series, click here.

Isaak Babel

These three stories come from Babel’s posting as the equivalent of an embedded war correspondent with a Cossack regiment in Poland in 1920. They are not compromised or sanitised in any way, however: the convey the full savagery and horror not only of war but of military life. My First Goose, for example, is set not on the battlefield but in the barracks, where the narrator arrives, a bookish political commissar, and is mocked and threatened by the soldiers. The only way he can establish respect for himself is by stamping on a goose, breaking its neck, skewering it with his sabre and bullying a suicidal old woman into roasting it for him. After this show of savagery, the soldiers finally call him “Brother”. It ends with warmth and brotherhood, sleeping in the hay loft, “all six of us, warming one another, legs entangled, beneath a roof whose holes let in stars. I dreamed, and I dreamed of women, and only my heart, crimson with murder, screeched and bled.” The other two stories follow in similar vein, with brutality and violence everywhere triumphing and yet a strange compassion for everyone involved in it – perhaps because the individuals themselves are not to blame but the situation of the war, which forces them to behave in ways that would in normal life be considered repulsive. Really powerful writing.

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Maybe I’m missing something here, but these six very short pieces don’t seem special to me. They are quite amusing evocations of a period, commenting on the quirks of the system or the absurdities of bureaucracy – for example, all the statements and certificates needed to retrieve a galosh lost on a tram – but I don’t see much beyond that. As I read them, they reminded me of newspaper columns, complaining about a particular incident and poking gentle fun at various aspects of progress. But they weren’t very memorable for me I’m afraid.

Leonid Dobychin

Again, very short pieces, and they didn’t do much for me. Babel’s stories were short, but communicated a lot. These ones just seemed like well-written snapshots of a particular scene, but with little character or plot development. As I looked over them for this review, I barely remembered having read them first time around. I did like the spare, minimalist writing style, so maybe I’d enjoy some of his longer works.

The Third Son and The Return by Andrei Platonov

My first encounter with Platonov, and I loved both of these stories. The Third Son deals with the difficulty of mourning, as six sons come home for their mother’s funeral. They stand around the body but she seems like “an indifferent stranger, an old woman who had nothing to do with them”. An Orthodox priest performs a ceremony, which the mother had wanted, but it means nothing: the sons are just “standing guard around a coffin, not taking part in a service”. Only late at night, when the third son goes in to see the body alone and collapses with grief, can they each go off in secret and mourn their dead mother in their own ways. It’s a very subtle and affecting portrayal of grief and of the emptiness of a lot of formal rituals. The Return was my favourite story in the whole book. Published in 1946, it really conveys how the long years of war changed people and made it difficult to return to peacetime lives. Ivanov had become close to his comrades and to Masha, a girl who had worked in the airfield canteen. As he travels home to his wife and children, he becomes infatuated with Masha and kisses her, the smell of her hair (like autumn leaves fallen in a forest) lingering with him even after he leaves her to continue his journey home. When Ivanov reaches his family, he is filled with regret. He doesn’t recognise his children: his son Petya has had to grow up and help manage the household in hard times, and is quite unpleasant, ordering his sister and mother around and chastising them if they waste a piece of potato by peeling too deep. His daughter Nastya doesn’t even recognise him, and cries when he comes near her. Meanwhile he starts to hate his wife Lyuba, who has accepted help from a man in the town who the children now call “Uncle Semyon”. She insists she was not unfaithful, that she just needed help and he was kind, but Ivanov is furious and calls her a whore and starts to go back on the train to find Masha. The ending is really beautiful, another kind of return, and the whole story really shows perfectly the difficulty of fitting lives back together after they have been torn apart, how you never can really just “return to normal”.

The Old Woman by Danil Kharms

Very, very bizarre. A man sees an old woman in a yard holding a wall clock. He asks her the time. She tells him to look for himself, but the clock has no hands. She tells him it’s a quarter to three, and he thanks her. Later she comes into his room, orders him to kneel down and then lie on the floor, and then dies. The rest of the story is about his comical attempts to dispose of the body, which sometimes comes to life and changes position or even crawls towards him. It’s beautifully written and has a dreamlike (or perhaps nightmare-like) quality, although I wish it had gone somewhere. I get the feeling there was a lot of symbolism in there that I didn’t quite pick up on, but I enjoyed it anyway as a weird, surreal and sometimes outright funny tale.

Two stories about abrupt deaths, both beautifully written, both very different. The Gentleman from San Francisco is about the transitory nature of existence. A bit like Dostoevsky’s Bobok, it shows how a lot [...]]]> For the original post in this series, click here.

The Gentleman from San Francisco and In Paris by Ivan Bunin

Two stories about abrupt deaths, both beautifully written, both very different. The Gentleman from San Francisco is about the transitory nature of existence. A bit like Dostoevsky’s Bobok, it shows how a lot of the things we think are important are rendered irrelevant by death. The gentleman from San Francisco is very wealthy and is treated with exaggerated deference by the staff at a hotel in Italy, but when he dies suddenly he becomes a source of irritation and shame. His wife asks that his body be taken back to his room, but the hotel owner refuses, saying that the news would be known all over Capri and nobody would take the suite afterwards. The corpse, in fact, must be removed immediately – no coffins would be available so soon, but “the English soda water came in large strong boxes if the divisions were removed.” The contrast is stark and powerful.

In Paris, on the other hand, is based on Bunin’s emigré life in Paris, and describes the meeting of two lonely people and their falling in love. Abruptly, though, the man dies just after they have got together. It’s a very short story, and I liked how it appeared to fulfil all the credentials of a good romance, until the man’s sudden death changed everything.

Love and A Family Journey by Teffi

One story about childhood, another about marriage, and I liked the childhood one better. Love is about a nine-year-old’s innocent childhood infatuation with a serving girl called Ganka. She steals an orange and gives it to Ganka, hoping to show her something new and wonderful, but Ganka doesn’t know it has to be peeled, and just bites into it, makes a horrible face and spits it out, throwing what’s left into the bushes. The story really captures the sensitivity of the child, how obsessed she became with pleasing Ganka, and how, when Ganka spat out the orange, it seemed like “Everything was over. I had become a thief in order to give her the best thing I knew in all the world. And she hadn’t understood, and she had spat it out. How would I ever get over this grief and this hurt?”

In A Family Journey, we follow the family from hell – wife and mother-in-law nagging a hen-pecked non-entity of a husband in a hot, stuffy train carriage. It’s an amusing scene, and I did feel for the husband, but it felt like just that – a scene – and I expected something else to happen but it never did.

The Lion by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Quite a nice little tale about a man who becomes infatuated with a policewoman, and when she says she might fall for a man who’s an actor, he volunteers to stand in for someone playing a lion at the theatre. It was enjoyable, but not really very memorable.

Quadraturin by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Krzhizhanovsky was, in his own words, “known for being unknown”. He lived from 1887 to 1950, but his first book was only published in 1989. Perhaps he should have considered a pseudonym. This story was very well done, and reminded me a little of Kafka. Quadraturin is a miraculous new invention that increases the size of a room when applied evenly to the walls and ceiling. The name and description mimic science and marketing, and the obsession with the size of living quarters is familiar from other Soviet-era writers. When Sutulin applies it, his tiny little room does indeed begin to expand exponentially. This is not, however, the unqualified success you’d expect. It goes from being a cozy room to a huge cavern, still lit by the same weak bulb and so full of shadowy corners. He ends up getting lost in it and panicking, calling out to his neighbours from the wilderness. It’s a wonderful closing image to a clever little story.

Lalla’s Interests by Vera Inber

Inber was forced to do a lot of patriotic writing – being Trotsky’s cousin, she was always under suspicion and had to work hard to prove her loyalty. But this story is about children in an apartment block meeting secretly to discuss their interests and organise against their parents. It was an interesting idea, but didn’t really come off for me. The ending felt as if it was supposed to be a twist, but it was for me only confirming what I’d already understood to have happened. So not one of my favourites.

The Embroidered Towel by Mikhail Bulgakov

This story appears as a fairly simple account of a young country doctor operating on a young girl and unexpectedly saving her life. But being set in 1917, it could also be read as a veiled attack on Communism, the young girl representing Russia, mangled and bloodied but just about surviving. According to the introduction it could also be about initiation into manhood and sexuality, but I didn’t really get that from it.

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 [...]]]> 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.