"A Swim In a Pond in the Rain"

[fiefoe]

No wonder George Saunders is such a beloved teacher. Being led by him in close-reading these Russian short stories feels like a privilege.

• help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal. At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.


• * the stories, which are, for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical, this idea may strike you as strange; but this is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer’s politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.


• The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.


• Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?


• * The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

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"IN THE CART"

• A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.


• He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”). <> In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins.


• * What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.


• * We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it.


• A million peasants could drive this cart. We’re waiting to find out why Chekhov chose this specific peasant to do it.


• So a broad character (a handsome rich man) is cross-painted with contradictory information (he is, yes, handsome and rich, but he’s also a bumbler, and we feel his alcoholism to be a function of his bumbling, a form of inattention or denial).


• We like hearing our world described. And we like hearing it described specifically... A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented. It’s sort of a cheap, or at least easy, authorial trick.


• That cat, having been placed in that particular story, is now, also, a metaphorical cat, in relation to all of the other dozens (hundreds) of metaphorical elements floating around in the story. <> And that cat now has to do some story-specific work.


• * A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.


• remembering the stupid globes he gives to the school, a gift that allows him to think of himself, incorrectly, as an enlightened, useful person.


• //“And you can’t understand,” she thought, “why God gives good looks, friendliness, charming, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless people—why they are so attractive.”


• Einstein once said: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”


• * We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.


• Chekhov has, with Hanov’s exit, denied himself the obvious, expected source of resolution... This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.” If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself.


• By declining to go there, the story now begins asking a more profound question: “What if a lonely person can find no way out of her loneliness?” <> This is where, to me, the story starts to feel big. It’s saying: loneliness is real and consequential and there is no easy way out of it


• //not enlightenment, but the examinations. And when did she have time to think of a call, of enlightenment? Teachers, impecunious physicians, doctors’ assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of firewood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna can bear it for a long time;


• Chekhov is averse to making pure saints or pure sinners. ..  we see it now with Marya (struggling noble schoolteacher who has constructed her own cage through joyless complicity in her situation). This complicates things; our first-order inclination to want to understand a character as “good” or “bad” gets challenged. The result is an uptick in our attentiveness; subtly rebuffed by the story, we get, we might say, a new respect for its truthfulness. .. the story says, “Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?”


• * teahouse scene: In those monologues (as in, I suppose, all of our inner monologues) she retained control, by subtly judging Semyon and Hanov, and through the very act of intelligent reflection. But now we’ve seen how precarious her position really is. In fact, it’s worse than she knows. She’s become blind to how far she’s fallen—but now we know.


• Again, Chekhov’s instinct seems to be toward variation, against stasis. .. Because of the variation in his presentation, we’re able to read Semyon two ways at once: as a nineteenth-century Russian version of a conspiracy theorist, always willing to believe the worst of anyone in power, and as someone who, though he lives in the same low milieu as Marya, has managed to maintain a lively (although erratically precise) interest in the things going on around him.


• Notice, too, that we’re reading Semyon and Marya against one another. They’re like two dolls in a box, fallen into different postures. He’s interested in the world; she’s not. ...And, actually, there are three dolls in there: Marya, Semyon, and Hanov. Without even meaning to, we’re continually scanning the three for similarities and differences.


• * A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it. The “meaning” of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another. .. That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.


• That’s the moment we’re seeking as we write. We’re revising and revising until we write the text up, so to speak, and it produces that “now it’s a story” feeling. <> One good way to investigate what causes that feeling: experimentally truncate a good story before the point where its creator actually ended it.


• Note the beautiful, dominoes-falling effect of the causation here: the early energy of our pity for Marya (which made us hope she would get some relief, which we mistakenly thought might come from Hanov) was deepened by this terrible day, a day that culminated in the ruining of her purchases, and the cumulative pain of the day caused her to mistake a stranger for her mother, which, in turn, caused her to remember who she used to be, which gave her the first instant of happiness we’ve seen her experience the whole time we’ve known her, poor thing, which is to say, since the beginning of the story.


• Semyon calls for her to “get in,” i.e., “get back into this cart that is your actual life.” Suddenly “it all vanished.”


• We’ve said that a story frames a moment of change, saying, implicitly: “This is the day on which things changed forever.” A variant of that says, “This is the day on which things almost changed forever, but didn’t.” Before the moment at the train tracks, “In the Cart” was a variant of that variant, saying, “This is the day on which it appeared that things might have changed forever, but then they didn’t, because they never could have, of course” (the story of a brief, deceptive welling up of hope). At the train tracks, the story becomes: “This is the day on which things did, in fact, change forever, but in a way we didn’t expect, that might be for better and might be for worse.”


• We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. ... He gave us no reason to put any emotional distance between ourselves and Marya


• Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”


• * A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response. <> What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is.

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"THE SINGERS"

• //He is an excellent judge of what a true Russian considers to be either interesting or important: of horses and cattle, timber, bricks, crockery, textiles, leather, singing, and dancing.


• //he had a fever, that sudden, shaking fever which is so familiar to all who speak or sing in public.


• // Encouraged by these signs of general satisfaction, the contractor let himself go in good earnest and went off into such flourishes, such tongue-clickings and drummings, such frantic throat play, that when, at last exhausted, pale, and bathed in hot perspiration, he threw himself back and let out a last dying note, a loud burst of general exclamation was the instantaneous response of his audience.


• //Why are you still sticking to him like a leaf from the whisk in a bath-house?”


• *//it quivered, but with the barely perceptible inner quivering of passion which pierces like an arrow into the hearer’s soul, and it grew continually in strength, firmness, and breadth. I remember once seeing in the evening, at low tide, a great white seagull on the flat sandy shore of the sea which was roaring away dully and menacingly in the distance: it was sitting motionless, its silky breast turned toward the scarlet radiance of sunset, only now and then spreading out its long wings toward the familiar sea, toward the low, blood-red sun; I remembered that bird as I listened to Yashka. He sang, completely oblivious of his rival and of all of us, but visibly borne up, like a strong swimmer by the waves, by our silent, passionate attention. He sang, and every note recalled something that was very near and dear to us all, something that was immensely vast, just as though the familiar steppe opened up before you, stretching away into boundless distance.


• A story with a problem is like a person with a problem: interesting. <> As we read a story (let’s imagine) we’re dragging along a cart labeled “Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing” (TICHN). ... What we’re adding to our TICHN cart are, let’s say, “non-normative” aspects of the story—aspects that seem to be calling attention to themselves through some sort of presentational excess.


• When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event—a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn—he pays a price: our reading energy drops.


• A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.


• Nothing is at stake if the contestants are identical. If I say: “Two guys got in a fight in a bar across from my house and, guess what? One of them won!”—that’s not meaningful. What would make it meaningful is knowing who those guys were.  ... he actually doesn’t have much to say about his two main characters that would serve to distinguish one from the other


• The contractor’s gifts are primarily technical. His singing is described in terms of technique, and he has an effect on the audience in two places: first after that “particularly successful transition” and again at the end, via that “throat play.” <> Again, specificity makes character.


• The story has become a referendum on . . . ​something. We’re not sure what yet. But we know that, on one side of the ballot, is Technical Prowess.


• * We might, at this point, recall some earlier birds in the story, those “doleful” rooks and crows, those “fighting” sparrows, back on page 3. This seagull is a freer species of bird, far from this crummy, sweltering little town, out in some cool, clean ocean air. Unlike those local birds, it’s not suffering;


• Nothing like this happened while the contractor was singing. He amazed, but did not transport them. The contractor’s performance was described in terms of what he could do, Yashka’s in terms of what he caused his listeners to feel.


• A Sportsman’s Sketches, was a groundbreaking work of literary anthropology that afforded the literati a look at how “these people,” i.e., rural peasants, lived. Turgenev was praised at the time for the sensitivity and compassion of his portrayals and for their realism.


• We have a low tolerance for the long-winded, endlessly explaining narrator. As one of my students once put it: in Turgenev, action and description seem to take turns stepping up to the microphone, one falling silent while the other speaks. The effect is static, awkward, occasionally maddening. A character’s backstory comes in the form of a sort of data dump


• * The heart of the story is a singing performance that we can’t actually hear. These side characters tell us what to think about it. We watch them to see how the contractor and Yashka are doing. And we value their assessments differently, according to what we’ve been told about them... So, he serves as a sort of Idiot Judge—a personification of undiscriminating judgment, mob mentality, the first to react, strongly but, usually, incorrectly. ..


• So (our defense continues): Turgenev has made a panel of judges with different personalities and degrees of susceptibility and authority, which allows him to provide a precise picture of the two performances as they unfold in real time, via a precise hierarchy of response. That is why these side characters must be described:


• this optional assignment: Then another 10 percent? When do you first start to feel that you’re cutting into the bone, i.e., divesting the story of some of the mysterious beauty that, in spite of its wordiness, is there in the original?


• * And here we feel the story saying something about our need for art. People, even “lowly” people, crave beauty and will go to great lengths to get a taste of it. But, also, beauty is dangerous, and can get into a person so powerfully that it shakes him up and confuses him and incites him, even, to violence.


• So: the contractor and the first brother are literalists, technicians; they try to get things done; they have a goal in mind. .. Yashka and the second brother, on the other hand, are passive, fragile, more vulnerable to the brutality that prevails here in this provincial dump.


• * In the pub, we felt singing as a mode of communication, elevating these rough men. The singing made some of them cry, gave them access to a register of emotion mostly denied them in their everyday lives. But singing, here, at the end of the story, is a way of getting some violence arranged, a form of trickery committed by one brother on another. So the story also becomes about that—about exalted things being brought low.


• * We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.


• * Let’s go ahead and try this “holding up against” exercise by holding up that ravine against the singing contest. <> When I do that, the first feeling that arises is that there is a relation, and this relation is not random. .. Now let’s go on and try to articulate the exact nature of the good feeling we get when we juxtapose “ravine” and “singing contest.” <> One thing that comes to mind is the notion of a binary: there are two singers, and the town is cleft in two. This makes me ask, of the story: Any other binaries in there?


• * So, we feel the story to be saying something about technical proficiency vs. emotional power, and coming down in favor of the latter. It is saying that the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven. <> And this is where I always fall in love, again, with the story and forgive it all its faults. Here I’ve been resenting Turgenev’s technical bumbling—those piles of noses and brows and hairlines; the stop-and-start action; the digressions inside of digressions—and suddenly I’m moved: by Yashka’s performance,


• It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it. <> I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be.


• The blessing an artist gives the final product (which he gives by sending it out into the world) is his way of saying that he approves of everything within it, even parts of it that may, in that moment, be hidden from him. <> That is to say, final approval isn’t given just by one’s conscious mind.


• * He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them. <> In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.


• The beauty of this method is that it doesn’t really matter what you start with or how the initial idea gets generated. What makes you you, as a writer, is what you do to any old text, by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft. Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it.


• * The final product was complex, and I think you could say it had “meaning,” but it wasn’t a meaning we’d intentionally put there; no way could we have planned out something so strange... the thing we would have planned would have been less. The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can do only if it has legitimately surprised its creator.


• * A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer. We feel her, over there on the production end of the process, imagining that we are as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is. Because she’s paying attention to where we are (to where she’s put us), she knows when we are “expecting a change” or “feeling skeptical of this new development” or “getting tired of this episode.”

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"THE DARLING"

• //it seemed to her that it was Kukin fighting his fate and assaulting his chief enemy, the apathetic public. Her heart contracted sweetly,


• //It seemed to her that she had been in the lumber business for ages, that lumber was the most important, the most essential thing in the world, and she found something intimate and touching in the very sound of such words as beam, log, batten, plank, box board, lath, scantling, slab . . .


• //“An island is a body of land . . .” she repeated and this was the first opinion she expressed with conviction after so many years of silence and mental vacuity.


• One time-honored way of creating an expectation: enactment of a pattern... “The Darling” is this type of story—what we might call a “pattern story.” Its baseline pattern is: a woman falls in love and that love comes to an end. 


• What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation. Or, we might say: when escalation is suddenly felt to be occurring, it is a sign that our anecdote is transforming into a story.


• * The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness.


• * our friend remarries, and we see her enacting the same move on her new boyfriend. Who would judge this? Well, everyone. We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable and somewhat repetitive in its habits. Would your current partner ever call his or her new partner by the same pet name he/ she uses for you, once you are dead and buried?.. but no: love just is, and you happened to be in the path of it.


• It’s possible for us to compare—well, I’d say it’s impossible for us not to compare—the two relationships. The structure forces a comparison.


• But Chekhov asks (is alert to the value of asking), “Okay, but what if she doesn’t settle for Trot?” This sort of narrative alertness is one of Chekhov’s prime gifts. That is, he’s alert to the full potential of an inflection point he’s created—the place where he has to (gets to) make an authorial decision. Chekhov pauses and asks: Will it be more meaningful (“richer”) for Olenka to love the cat (as the story seems to expect her to do) or reject the cat?


• * She’s modeling the state of every autocrat: happy with her version of things, uninterested in anyone else’s. Her trait, her need to be totally absorbed in whatever she loves, charming enough when applied to Kukin et al., now feels narcissistic and oppressive. <> “The last words of the story are the child’s and a protest,” Eudora Welty wrote, “but they are delivered in sleep, as indeed protest to the darlings of this world will always be—out of inward and silent rebellion alone.”


• To me, “The Darling” is about a tendency, present in all of us, to misunderstand love as “complete absorption in,” rather than “in full communication with.” Could Olenka have been a man?


• We see Olenka’s mode of loving, from one angle, as a beautiful thing: in that mode, the self disappears and all that remains is affectionate, altruistic regard for the beloved. From another angle, we see it as a terrible thing, the undiscriminating application of her one-note form of love robbing love of its particularity: Olenka, love dullard, vampirically feeding upon whomever she designates as her beloved.


• Our thoughts are similarly restricted and have a similarly narrow purpose: to help the thinker thrive. <> All of this limited thinking has an unfortunate by-product: ego. Who is trying to survive? “I” am. The mind takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating from that point of view. Just like that, that entity (George!) becomes real, and he is (surprise, surprise) located at the exact center of the universe,


• * I’ve known her in so many modes: a happy young newlywed and a lonely old lady; a rosy, beloved darling and an overlooked, neglected piece of furniture, nearly a local joke; a nurturing wife and an overbearing false mother. <> And look at that: the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for Him that we don’t is infinite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.


• When we start reading a story, we do so with a built-in expectation that it will surprise us by how far it manages to travel from its humble beginnings; that it will outgrow its early understanding of itself. (Our friend says, “Watch this video of a river.” The minute the river starts to overflow its banks, we know why she wanted us to watch it.)


• She finds out what her unique writerly charms are only by feeling her way toward them through thousands of hours of work (and these may have an oblique relation to her “real” charms or even no relation at all). What she arrives at is not a credo but a set of impulses she gets in the habit of honoring. .. actually: What makes my reader keep reading?


• * what we’re doing (or at least what I’m doing, when I revise) is not so much trying to perfectly imagine another person reading my story, but to imitate myself reading it, if I were reading it for the first time. <> In a strange way, that’s the whole skill: to be able to lapse into a reasonable impersonation of yourself reading as if the prose in front of you (which you’ve already read a million times) was entirely new to you.


• So we might understand revision as a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader. What makes it more intense, direct, and honest?

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"MASTER AND MAN"

• //so there was nothing for it but for Nikita to get up too, put back into the sugar-basin the lump of sugar he had nibbled all round


• //the good obedient horse responded, now ambling, now slowly trotting in the direction in which he was sent, though he knew that he was not going the right way.


• //The thought that he might, and very probably would, die that night occurred to him, but did not seem particularly unpleasant or dreadful. It did not seem particularly unpleasant, because his whole life had been not a continual holiday, but on the contrary an unceasing round of toil of which he was beginning to feel weary.


• //“There, and you say you are dying! Lie still and get warm, that’s our way . . .” began Vasili Andreevich.
  But to his great surprise he could say no more, for tears came to his eyes and his lower jaw began to quiver rapidly. He stopped speaking and only gulped down the risings in his throat. “Seems I was badly frightened and have gone quite weak,” he thought. But this weakness was not only not unpleasant, but gave him a peculiar joy such as he had never felt before.
  “That’s our way!” he said to himself, experiencing a strange and solemn tenderness.


• //He remembered that Nikita was lying under him and that he had got warm and was alive, and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was he, and that his life was not in himself but in Nikita.


• //his dead head pressed against his frozen throat: icicles hung from his nostrils, his eyes were covered with hoar-frost as though filled with tears, and he had grown so thin in that one night that he was nothing but skin and bone.


• You’ll find that the story is nearly all facts, heavily weighted toward factual descriptions of action. .. when Tolstoy recounts the thoughts or feelings of his characters, he does this succinctly and precisely, using simple objective sentences that seem factual in their syntax and modesty of assertion. <> A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking.


• * Tolstoy sought the truth in two ways: as a fiction writer and as a moral preacher. He was more powerful in the former but kept being drawn back to the latter. And somehow, it’s this struggle, between (as Nabokov put it) “the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral,” that makes us feel Tolstoy as a moral-ethical giant. It’s as if he resorts to fiction only when he can’t help it and, having to make the sinful indulgence really count, uses it to ask only the biggest questions and answer these with supreme, sometimes lacerating honesty. <> Tolstoy was not, however, according to the diaries of his wife, Sonya, much of a moral-ethical giant around the house.


• * Kundera: I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas... He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.


• It’s what Tolstoy does once he’s in a mind: he makes a direct, factual report of what he finds there. No judgment, no poetry. Just flat observation—which is, of course, a form of self-observation


• * two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.
  First, a willingness to revise.
  Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.
  Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality... This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.


• * As Vasili goes to pass, the drunken peasant driving that sled decides to race Vasili... Also: “Pushing things too hard, in order to win, causes problems” (which resonates with Vasili’s insistence on this ill-conceived trip). We contrast Vasili’s reaction to this incident with Nikita’s: Vasili is fired up by the competition; Nikita feels for the suffering horse. Actually, Vasili is fired up by the mere appearance of competition, where there actually was none (his sled had been gaining on the peasant sled all along). This reminds us of his monetary dealings with Nikita: Vasili enjoys winning even a rigged race.


• What does the race cause to happen? <> Well, it fires Vasili up. Of course it does. This man who lives to win has won: “This encounter cheered and enlivened Vasili Andreevich.” His elation then causes the next beat (“he drove on more boldly without examining the way-marks,


• that clothesline outside town that Vasili and Nikita pass four times: “the frozen washing . . . ​still fluttered desperately in the wind.” <> We read this addition of “still” and “desperately” as: “Yes, things continue to be desperate. And Vasili still doesn’t see it.” ... We barely notice the variations at speed but, on closer examination, feel them to be perfectly pitched. Rather than neatly spitting out some predetermined, reductive meaning, they produce a feeling of mystery, the metaphorical world lightly infiltrating the physical.


• Vasili, wishing to emulate that powerful master, might have been willing to reverse himself, to show how considerate he was of Nikita, his servant.


• But instead he meets this old, weak, defeated master and feels an aversion, and that aversion combines with the fact that the horse has already been harnessed (the dictatorship of politeness) to drive him back out into the night, and to his death.


• In a sense, Vasili is killed by his fealty to the idea that, to preserve and broadcast his power, a “master” must be firm, strong, and unpersuadable.


• The main action of the story is now over. Vasili has changed. We know this because of what he’s just done. It’s kind of a miracle of writing. Without narrating the logic of the transformation, Tolstoy has made Vasili do exactly what the story has made us believe he could never do. <> Vasili is as surprised about it as we are, and we watch his reaction to that change


• * He gets brought back to himself by acting like himself. As himself, he knows what to do. His natural energy, which for so long had been used to benefit only himself, gets redirected. A defect becomes a superpower... In this way, the border of the Nation of Vasili gets moved out just enough to encompass Nikita. Vasili is still acting in his own interest, but now that Nikita has become a colony of Vasili, action on his behalf feels natural


• * Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens.. by a redirection of his (same old) energy. What a relief this model of transformation is. What else do we have but what we were born with and have always, thus far, been served (and imprisoned) by? Say you’re a world-class worrier. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re “neurotic.” If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an “intense visionary activist.”


• Vasili felt that he and Nikita had merged into one person, but Nikita? Not so much. He doesn’t seem grateful to Vasili. He doesn’t think of Vasili at all... It also makes us wonder about the writer.


• * any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer’s work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story. <> Here, an accusation we’ve been dancing around (“Tolstoy seems to be exhibiting class bias”)* gets converted (by asking, “Where, exactly?”) into a neutral, more workable, technical observation: “In (at least) two places—when Nikita comes home from the hospital and in their respective death scenes—Nikita is denied the interiority that Tolstoy gave Vasili in similar moments.”

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THE NOSE

• //Like any self-respecting Russian artisan, Ivan Yakovlevich was a terrible drunkard.


• //he preferred a banknote to everything else. “This is the thing,” he would usually say. “There can be nothing better than it—it doesn’t ask for food, it doesn’t take much space, it’ll always fit into a pocket, and if you drop it it won’t break.”


• //Kovalyov was extremely quick to take offense. He could forgive whatever was said about himself, but never anything that referred to rank or title. He was even of the opinion that in plays one could allow references to junior officers, but that there should be no criticism of field officers.


• //But there is nothing enduring in this world, and that is why even joy is not as keen in the moment that follows the first; and a moment later it grows weaker still and finally merges imperceptibly into one’s usual state of mind, just as a ring on the water, made by the fall of a pebble, merges finally into the smooth surface. Kovalyov began to reflect and realized that the whole business was not yet over: the nose was found but it still had to be affixed, put in its proper place.


• //Ivan Yakovlevich draped him with a napkin and instantly, with the help of a shaving brush, transformed his chin and part of his cheek into the whipped cream served at merchants’ namesday parties.


• * //Only now, on second thoughts, can we see that there is much that is improbable in it. Without speaking of the fact that the supernatural detachment of the nose and its appearance in various places in the guise of a state councillor is indeed strange, how is it that Kovalyov did not realize that one does not advertise for one’s nose through the newspaper office? I do not mean to say that advertising rates appear to me too high: that’s nonsense, and I am not at all one of those mercenary people.


• But a story can also be truthful if it declines consensus reality—if things happen in it that don’t and could never happen in the real world.


• If a writer introduces a strange event, then lets the fictive world respond to that event, what we’re really learning about is what we might call the fictive world’s psychological physics.


• Fourth-level weirdness: Ivan executes the plan badly; he can’t get the job done because he approaches it with too much apprehension and because the world he finds out there is inflected with a slight, ornery hostility toward him: a constant flow of acquaintances and a street thick with policemen


• * It’s as if the narrator had misheard his own thesis statement, then set out to prove it using an inverted, goofy system of logic. <> And we begin to suspect that not only is Gogol’s universe off, his narrator is too.


• The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. .. As Maguire puts it, the narrator’s “enthusiasms outrun common sense.” <> So, this isn’t graceless writing; this is a great writer writing a graceless writer writing.


• Our narrator is touched with a stiff but imprecise literary formality. He’s pedantic and superior and overestimates his intelligence and charm. He has one arm over our shoulders and something strange on his breath as he (clumsily, grandiosely, making basic errors) invites us, his fellow sophisticates, to join him in looking down at his (lowly) characters. .. his failure to register adequate amazement at the strange things he’s narrating implicate him in the odd system he’s describing,


• challenges the notion that a disinterested, objective, third-person-omniscient narrator exists anywhere in the real world. It’s fun to pretend that such a person exists, and writers have made beautiful use of that notion (Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy among them), but, suggests Gogol, they have done so at a certain cost to the truth. Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated ... <> It’s like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, “correct” viewpoint exists.. In other words, like life.


• There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see... “Given how generally sweet people are, why is the world so fucked up?,” Gogol has an answer: we each have an energetic and unique skaz loop running in our heads, one we believe in fully


• * We’re left to conclude that the Nose is both a nose without a face and a nose with a face, at once. Or neither, exactly, or both, as needed by the syntactic moment. <> The fun here is spending a few moments in the land where language goes to admit what it really is: a system of communication with limitations, suitable for use in everyday life but wonky in its higher registers. Language can appear to say more than it has a right to say;


• Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world itself. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.


• ​poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening... The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasion


• One model of writing is that we strive upward to express ourselves precisely, at the highest levels of language (think Henry James). Another is that we surrender to our natural mode of expression,.. creating a poetic rarefication of that (inefficient) form of expression.


• abrupt moment of “focal shift,” but in Gogol “this shifting is the very basis of his art.” <> Gogol was obsessed with noses, afraid of leeches and worms; he could, apparently, touch the top of his (lengthy) nose with the tip of his tongue. His school nickname? “The mysterious dwarf.”


• Maybe Gogol was not observing some banal man out in the world and writing up his observations but observing the banal man that existed within him and writing that up. <> In his best work, I’d say, Gogol is two people at once: the inarticulate, bombastic, stiff, provincial narrator and the writer of acute taste looking over at that provincial, using him by channeling him, fine-tuning that voice into a thing of sublime comic beauty.


• “Abandoning (or abandoned by) the comic sense that had produced his best works,” Fanger writes, “he comes increasingly to resemble one of his own caricatures.”


• * It’s sadder, the saddest, that the clerk, not at all malevolent, is still utterly unhelpful. <> And we learn something about Kovalyov that rings true for all of us: he adapts quickly (too quickly) to insane new conditions. He has access to limited outrage. Sooner than we expect him to, he accepts his terrifying new state and goes on living, sad, peeved, but not rebellious; that would be impolite.


• The Germany in Klemperer’s book has something in common with Gogol’s printing office. In both, something troubling (a missing nose, a hateful political agenda) is met with polite, well-intended civility—a civility that wants things to go on as usual... Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the “passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky.”


• But the higher-order reason is this: we come to feel that the story’s strange logic is not the result of error, is not perverse or facile or random, but is the universe’s true logic—that it is the way things actually work, if only we could see it all clearly.


• it seems equally incorrect to say that life is entirely rational... But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are. <> Gogol says that we are, in our everyday perceptions, deceived. We feel, mostly, that our actions matter, and that earnest communication is happening, that we are real and permanent and in control of our fate.


• Gogol’s main currency is joy. My favorite part of the story—a part that feels neither old or new but timeless—comes toward the beginning of the scene in the newspaper office when somehow, magically, a group of people waiting to place ads get transformed into that for which they are advertising, and suddenly that little office is full of “a coachman of sober conduct . . . ​a nineteen-year-old serf girl . . . ​a sound droshky with one spring missing . . . a young and fiery dappled-gray horse . . . a summer residence with all the appurtenances.”


• The nose is the best part of Kovalyov, the non-toadying part, the confident part, the part capable of shucking off the habit of convention to which Kovalyov is addicted,


• He confesses. “Only now, on second thoughts,” the narrator says, “can we see that there is much that is improbable in it.”
  “Uh, yeah,” we think. But what a relief, to hear this admission.


• I make a protest about the story’s failure to cohere logically.
  “I know, right?” the narrator says. “It’s a train wreck, isn’t it?”
  Somehow that’s enough.
  And just like that—like one of those Tibetan monks who spend weeks fastidiously creating a sand mandala—Gogol happily destroys his magnificent creation and sweeps it into the river.

---------
GOOSEBERRIES

• //Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, plunged into the water with a splash and swam in the rain, thrusting his arms out wide; he raised waves on which white lilies swayed. He swam out to the middle of the river and dived and a minute later came up in another spot and swam on and kept diving, trying to touch bottom. “By God!” he kept repeating delightedly, “by God!” He swam to the mill, spoke to the peasants there, and turned back and in the middle of the river lay floating, exposing his face to the rain. Burkin and Alyohin were already dressed and ready to leave, but he kept on swimming and diving.


• //Of course, you may scout about for five years and in the end make a mistake, and buy something quite different from what you have been dreaming of... But my brother was not at all disconcerted: he ordered a score of gooseberry bushes, planted them, and settled down to the life of a country gentleman.


• //he concerned himself with his soul’s welfare too in a substantial, upper-class manner, and performed good deeds not simply, but pompously. And what good works! He dosed the peasants with bicarbonate and castor oil for all their ailments and on his name day he had a thanksgiving service celebrated in the center of the village,


• //Nikolay Ivanych, who when he was a petty official was afraid to have opinions of his own even if he kept them to himself, now uttered nothing but incontrovertible truths and did so in the tone of a minister of state: ‘Education is necessary, but the masses are not ready for it;


• //“They were hard and sour, but as Pushkin has it,
  The falsehood that exalts we cherish more / Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.


• //I said to myself: how many contented, happy people there really are! What an overwhelming force they are! Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying— Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet;


• //Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.


• He urges Burkin and Alyohin: Live not for happiness but for something greater. “Do not cease to do good!” —Back in the drawing room, Ivan’s story is judged a big drag.


• I believe it. And I bet Chekhov believed it, too; the speech feels like it could have come right out of his journal. And because that speech (the heart of the heart of the story) is “about” the question of whether our urge to be happy is to be indulged or resisted, we feel the story to be a sort of meditation on that question.


• Ivan’s thoughtlessness complicates our feelings about him. “Do not cease to do good!” exhorted the guy so worked up by the sound of his voice that he neglected to enact common courtesy.


• The story just got enlarged. It is, yes, still about the possible decadence of happiness, but it’s also now about how trivial it is to hold a one-dimensional opinion. Or how impossible it is. Ivan doesn’t really believe that happiness is bad, or, if he does, he also, at the same time, believes that it’s essential.


• His virtuous takedown of happiness seems touched with a bit of emotional bolshevism: thou shalt not be happy, as I have deemed it sinful. 


• * Pelageya: Ivan and Burkin’s reaction to her proves that no one is immune to an outburst of startling loveliness; they are made instantly more alive just by seeing her. Pelageya is a human version of that refreshing pond... a reminder that beauty is an unavoidable, essential part of life; it keeps showing up and we keep responding to it,... Her presence causes the story to issue a caution, even as it sincerely asks whether happiness is morally justifiable: “Careful not to neglect the reality of positive emotions in your quest for moral purity.”


• But she has another, complicating purpose: she’s the one doing all the dang work... Her presence supports Ivan’s position that “the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence


• On the other hand, Burkin is (also) a (different kind of) bummer. We feel him resisting the truth at the core of Ivan’s speech: happiness oppresses. It’s the Burkins of the world (those stolid, unimaginative reactionaries, who swim for exactly the right length of time and enjoy it exactly the correct amount) who keep the big, evil machine rolling.


• The rain functions in the story like a side character:... what it is that the rain is “reminding” you of (or “saying” to you or “representing”) as it taps on the window there at the end. It’s not just one thing. It’s many things at once. And it’s personal;


• If we understand the story to be asking, “Is it right to seek happiness?” the material contained within the digression splinters that question into others: “If we choose to disavow happiness, what do we lose?” “Is life to be lived for pleasure or duty?” “How much belief is too much?” “Is life a burden or a joy?”


• Let’s decide, for example, that the story isn’t about happiness but extremism—guess what? It is. Look at how many extremists are in it:


• * A story means, at the highest level, not by what it concludes but by how it proceeds. <> “Gooseberries,” as we’re seeing, proceeds by a method of persistent self-contradiction. If one aspect of it seems to be expressing a certain view, a new aspect of it will appear and challenge that view.


• * Chekov: gave free medical treatment to anyone who needed it, and financed hospitals and schools all over Russia, many of which still exist today. <> This feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination... He has a gift for reconsideration. Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person,


• * as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to “prove” anything.


• Any idea we express is just one of many we have within us... If you’re a pro-immigration person, are there anti-immigrant feelings down there inside you? Of course: that’s why you get so emotional when arguing for immigrants’ rights. You’re arguing against that latent part of yourself.


• it reminds us that those other, quieter instruments were there all the time. And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. <> And this is why literature works.


• I like what I like, and you like what you like, and art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill. How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference? <> The choosing, the choosing, that’s all we’ve got.

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ALYOSHA THE POT

• Alyosha is stumbling toward a new truth and the only tool he has to use is his own limited language. <> It’s not much of a stretch from what Tolstoy does with Alyosha’s voice here to what Woolf would soon do in To The Lighthouse (and Joyce in Ulysses and Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury). Tolstoy has reached an understanding that would pervade modernism: a person and her language can’t be separated.


• One way to read Alyosha is as an example of what is called, in Russia, a “holy fool.” ... Someone who, as described by Richard Pevear, “lives and dies with a purity and inner peace that forever eluded Tolstoy and most of his characters.” For such a person, the state of “being cheerful” is, in itself, a valid spiritual aim.


• In “Alyosha the Pot,” we might say that Tolstoy did the inverse: he unintentionally cursed what he set out to bless. That is, though he admires Alyosha in theory, and wrote the story to praise his acquiescence and cheerful obedience, the story itself, touched by Tolstoy’s honest artistry, can’t quite bring itself to deliver that message unambiguously.


• * Tolstoy had a dual nature;  ... “So-called great men are always terribly contradictory,” Tolstoy told Gorky. “That is forgiven them with all their other follies. Though contradictoriness is not folly: a fool is stubborn, but does not know how to contradict himself.”.. It wasn’t just age that produced the contradiction; the artist and the prude seemed to flicker on and off in him at every stage of his life.


• “The story” is really these two coexistent interpretations, eternally struggling for prominence. If we decide that the story supports cheerful obedience, it does. If we decide that it opposes cheerful obedience, it does.

----
__ Where else can we go, but the pages of a story, to prefer so strongly, react without rationalization, love or hate so freely, be so radically ourselves?
__ My life has led me to a certain place and I’m contentedly resting there. Then, here comes the story, and I am slightly undone, in a good way. Not so sure anymore, of my views