Russian Short Stories Part 1: Leo Tolstoy 1852-1859

"It does not matter much where you begin with him; you feel instantly that the man is mighty, and mighty through his conscience; that he is not trying to surprise or dazzle you with his art, but that he is trying to make you think clearly and feel rightly about vital things with which "art" has often dealt with diabolical indifference or diabolical malevolence." --William Dean Howells (Introduction to Sebastopol, 1887 edition)

I agree with W. D. Howells. Discovering Tolstoy has been one of the great joys in life for me. Tolstoy stirs the reader's moral sense without condescension, telling truths about human experience in a voice so powerful yet so personal and confiding. But I disagree with Howells on one point; It really does matter where one begins with Tolstoy. Instead of ripping right into the borscht-intensive main course that is War and Peace, there are several smaller but still rich and satisfying delicacies by Leo Tolstoy to graze upon. 

My first taste of Tolstoy was the same book that introduced Howells to his work. The Cossacks (1863), is about a Russian socialite who, in an attempt to flee his from his social obligations (and a few outstanding gambling debts) to find meaning, joins the army and lives among the people in the Caucasus mountains at the beginning of the Crimean War. It was a revelation to me. Disarmed by the novel's enormous heart, I fell in love with it instantly. It is a novel that is sensitive, brutal and intensely personal in a way I hadn't encountered before in literature. When I was finished reading it, I felt a longing that I can't define. I felt so close to it that writing about it for the blog proved difficult. Only through reading have I been able to achieve such a heightened mental and emotional state. I was hooked and had to learn more.

In this series, we'll begin to explore Russian short stories with a look at two collections by Tolstoy written in the period between 1852 and 1859. I think modern readers will be pleasantly surprised by the tightness and even pacing of his prose. Though a towering giant in the world of literature, Tolstoy is very readable. Whatever knowledge of nineteenth century Russia you may lack will be answered by brief and helpful footnotes. The universality of the themes easily overshadows most of the historical and cultural particulars, and his compassionate voice draws our attention to haunting, uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Here are two very good places to start.

A Russian Proprietor and Other Stories (1888) by Leo Tolstoy

This volume collects some early short stories of the twentysomething Tolstoy. I know that I've warned readers of The Overleaf to avoid introductions in the past, but in this case, the preface by translator Nathan Haskell Dole is actually useful, giving us a few contextual clues without spoiling anything. 

"A Russian Proprietor" is an unfinished novel that, as Dole points out, stands well on its own. It's the story of an idealistic young Russian landowner who drops out of college to manage his property and attend to his serfs' needs in the hopes of improving their lives. He soon discovers that his education and idealism have done little to prepare him for the reality of their conditions and temperament. The clash between his ideals and their reality makes for some awkward and often comic situations that force him to rethink his plans and to sort his altruistic intentions from his egotistic impulses. Dole tells us that these stories have many parallels with Tolstoy's own life, which explains much. The autobiographical character of his writing is perhaps what makes his words feel so intimate. One gets the sense that Tolstoy has learned many of the lessons in these stories for himself.

Breaking through social barriers in search of a genuine human connection is a theme shared by a few of these stories. "Lucerne" finds a well-to-do traveller at a Swiss resort, is irritated by the cold formality of English tourists and craves a real conversation with a real human being. He notices and befriends a street musician whose mere presence in the hotel drinking champagne causes a chain reaction of snobbery, from the rich hotel guests to the waiters and kitchen servants. In "Albert", an aristocratic man brings home a brilliant but troubled violinist from a party in the hopes of reforming him only to find that Albert is incapable of fitting in with his new friend's plans for him. "Three Deaths"  tells of two consumptive people of different social classes who befall the same fate under markedly different circumstances. No spoiler from me on the third death, however.

There are two stories in which gambling and roguery figure prominently--subjects that Tolstoy knew of firsthand in his younger days. "Recollections of a Scorer" tells  of a man's downfall from the perspective of a scorekeeper in a pool hall. In an almost naturalist narrative style (an extreme rarity for Tolstoy), the scorer relates without judgement a nobleman's pathetic demise and ruination from compulsive gambling. 

"Two Hussars" is an engaging tale that contrasts two generations of cavalrymen. The elder Count Turbin, whose pleasing good looks, formidable dancing skills and penchant for wild times that costs him his life contrasts favorably with his more sensible but less remarkable son. It's interesting to see Tolstoy's developing style; The pacing of the first half is very effective, but the resolution in the second half is abrupt. One gets the feeling he's trying to apply various approaches to express the ideas in his head. Plenty of good stuff there, though.

"A Prisoner in the Caucasus" is an adventure story written for children about a Russian soldier who is captured and held for ransom by a group of Tartars.  The simplicity of Tolstoy's prose and the quick-moving story can turn any willing reader into an eleven-year-old kid. A little violent by today's standards and the Tartars are certainly not treated as heroes, but a pretty gripping read.

Download A Russian Proprietor & Other Stories from Project Gutenberg

The young soldier Leo Tolstoy in 1854

Sebastopol (1887) by Leo Tolstoy

Between 1853 and 1856, France and Britain waged war against Russia's Tsar Nicholas I, who attempted to salvage the bedraggled remains of the Ottoman Empire in an effort to control the Mediterranean Sea, the holy grail of European conquest and influence. Things did not go as planned. This book of three short stories gives us a view of the conflict from the point of view of Russian soldiers in the city of Sebastopol on the Black Sea in what is now the Ukraine where Tolstoy served in the army. 

In the first piece, "Sebastopol in December, 1854", Tolstoy describes in vivid detail what he must have seen upon his arrival. We see a bubbling cauldron of human activity in the army encampment very close to the front lines, the piles of artillery, the horses, the tattered refugees trying to get passage away from the carnage by boat, and busy soldiers in transit. Tolstoy doesn't spare the reader the grim nightmare that is the makeshift hospital with its mutilated soldiers howling in dire agony, awaiting help as they lay on stretchers next to the corpses of their comrades. We see the town itself as soldiers and locals frequent restaurants and shops with the eerie pretense of normality. We hear the sound of gunfire and cannons of the fourth bastion where the fiercest fighting takes place. We see the trenches on the front lines where thousands of young men, full of courage and patriotism, met with their doom.  The first of the three sketches is patriotic in tone, but underscored by chilling visions of the reality of war.

In "Sebastopol in May, 1855", we return to the battle scarred city and the tone changes from one of patriotism to one of disillusionment. Amidst the carnage, soldiers try to carry on with the business of warfare, focusing on their appointed jobs to keep the insanity of their situation at bay. We see white gloved officers putting on airs of gentility and asserting their civilian social status--one of many incongruities in a place where all men potentially face the same fate. The officers are to an extent detached from the reality of their surroundings yet still experience the horrors of war. Tolstoy criticizes their vanity and pettiness and notes an ambivalent mixture of good and evil in men. Truth, he concludes, is the true hero of the story of the war.

In "Sebastopol in August, 1855", the idealism and disillusionment of the two previous sketches are brought together. Volodiya Koseltzoff, a young ensign, volunteers to leave his quiet post at St. Petersburg to join his older brother Mikhail  at Sebastopol. We follow him as he reunites with his brother and travels on to find his new post. He is filled with idyllic visions of fighting alongside his brother as they journey towards the front lines, but the sight of a ward full of gruesomely wounded soldiers and the sound of gun and cannon fire fill him with terror and dread. He is at first appalled by what he perceives as his own cowardliness, but as he meets the men with whom he will serve--apparently oblivious to the horror of their situation and more concerned with griping about their gambling debts--he begins to feel more at ease. The closer he gets to battle, the braver he becomes.

That's all I can tell you without being a rotten spoiler, so you'll have to find out for yourself the fate of these two brothers. Tolstoy's descriptions of war, his firsthand understanding of the psychology of war and the terror felt in men's hearts, and his moral outrage at the senseless loss of human life make these stories compelling and unforgettable. Technically, the writing becomes more focused as the stories progress. Not an easy read, but an excellent example of the young writer's growing talents. Very moving.

Read Sebastopol online at Google Books

The short stories are a good way to get to know Tolstoy. In fact, short stories are a good way to become familiar with Russian literature. Don't forget to have a look at my piece on Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, which is another superb collection of Russian short fiction. Next time, we'll look at some stories by Tolstoy written after War and Peace and Anna Karenina that reveal a very different voice.

By the way, if you read eBooks downloaded from Project Gutenberg, I'd like you to consider making a small donation to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. They're doing very important work by digitizing great literature and making untold volumes of human knowledge and expression available to everyone for free. That's worth a few bucks, surely.

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

 Émile Zola 1840-1902

Despite being a loud-mouthed American who writes a blog about electronic editions of precious works of world literature, I feel it is my calling--nay, my duty--to try to write well-reasoned, insightful and penetrating observations about the great books I encounter. If I can't say something constructive, I will usually withhold comment. I don't trash books here, and I don't define my literary tastes in terms of what I don't like. The Overleaf  is a place for inclusiveness that seeks to make literature accessible, not to show off how cool and fancy my tastes are. I like to think of my readers coming along for the ride as we discover books together.

To respect, admire and enjoy a work of literature is the trifecta of a fulfilling reading for me.  If I finish a book and I'm able to apply those three words to the experience, I know that something truly speaks to me. Not that I expect books to consistently deliver on all three levels; sometimes the story or plotting aren't so hot, but the characters are brilliantly rendered. Now and then I'll encounter a work where the language may be a little stilted and the dialog somewhat stiff, but the theme is compelling. One can admire execution while expressing reservations about the overall result (or vice versa) without trashing a book. If I read something that I just don't care for, I usually keep mum about it here.

For the past couple of months, we have been looking at the development and influence of naturalism in the works of Ivan Turgenev, Theodore Dreiser, George Moore and James Joyce. I couldn't justify covering this topic without exploring at least one book by one of the granddaddies of naturalism, Émile Zola. French authors can be intimidating because it seems like those guys really enjoyed composing dense, grand, seemingly impenetrable, multi-volume novels it would take you a lifetime to read. And Émile Zola has a doosey--the Rougon-Macquart series, a twenty volume novel about life under Napoleon III. I'm sure it's wonderful, but no thanks! I just wanted a taste so I could put what I had learned about naturalism into broader perspective.

I was pleased to have found Thérèse Raquin, a stand-alone novel and his first to attract attention to his talents. This novel seemed the best place to start, and indeed it was; it gave me a great deal of insight as to how naturalism originated and evolved as well as into why this guy is so lauded as one of the great French novelists. After reading it, I can honestly say that he was a heck of a writer. But did I enjoy the book and the experience of reading it? Like a relationship in flux on Facebook, "It's Complicated"…

Thérèse Raquin (1867) by Émile Zola

Consider Madame Raquin. a widow who adopts Thérèse, a niece in need of a home after the death of her mother. She raises her with her son, Camille, a boy whose sickliness causes her mother to smother him with affection and care. Consider also that, despite Thérèse's good health, her aunt treats her the same as Camille--forcing her to take the boy's medicine along with him, despite her strength and health. Thérèse plays the part of an obedient, compliant daughter and companion to her cousin. Consider also that it is expected for these first cousins to marry someday so that Madame Raquin can have peace of mind knowing that her son will be looked after when she dies. As this destiny is fulfilled, so the trouble begins in Thérèse Raquin.

Forced to play a role in her family that is the exact opposite of her nature, it is no surprise that she avails herself of the first opportunity to feel real passion as Laurent, a co-worker of Camille's, becomes a weekly guest for dinner and dominoes every Thursday night in the apartment above Madame Raquin's mercery shop. Captivated by one another, they soon secretly seek each other's company and carry on a lusty affair. Dissatisfied with having to sneak around, Thérèse and Laurent decide that the best way to ensure their continued happiness is to kill Camille so they can be married.

And so they do. They drown Camille and claim it was an accident, fool everyone around them and get away with it. But they are then seized with ferocious guilt for their actions and are haunted nightly by visions of Camille's drowned body. Those visions don't go away after they're married, either; things get considerably worse. As their fear intensifies, the passion that brought Thérèse and Laurent together fades, and the now married couple descends into a nightmare of fear, hatred and self destruction. I won't spoil the ending for you, but I don't need to tell you that all of this doesn't end well.

In his preface to the second edition of this novel (quoted in the preface to the 1901 edition available on Project Gutenberg), Zola says that temperament rather than character was his primary interest in creating this novel. He treats his characters as though they are subjects in a scientific experiment. Yet the narrator isn't entirely disinterested, as he freely refers to his protagonists as murderers, brutes and fools throughout the novel. But indeed, every character present acts out of selfishness or at least self interest. As a result, there's no one really likable in this novel, and those who seek characters they like and identify with (all too common these days) will be sorely disappointed--at least not those who are unwilling to plumb the depths of their souls to find affinity with people who have committed acts for which they are ashamed and horrified. And we all have at least one or two of those, even if they are acts we have only committed in our hearts. 

I can see why Victorian England was uncomfortable with racy French books like this one. Compared to George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and W. M. Thackeray, this stuff is really off the hook. Zola speaks to the common undercurrent of guilt and fear that lurks in all human beings, and if you can't identify with that, you are probably fooling yourself. That's precisely why this novel works; it forces readers to confront their own unpleasant attitudes and experiences. That's one of the things truly great art does. Bravo to Émile Zola for using the medium of the novel so ingeniously, but one really wouldn't call the experience of reading it "fun". This book is well crafted, forward looking and disquieting. Worth reading? Definitely. But perhaps only once.

It would be easy to dismiss if it weren't so brilliantly written. The opening chapter that describes Madame Raquin's mercery shop and the greasy Paris neighborhood that surrounds it really draws the reader in with dark, exquisite detail. A gruesome chapter in which Laurent visits the morgue to see if his victim's body has been found is genuinely disturbing. The horrifying sights he sees are distressing enough to provide fodder for Laurent's nightmares and our nightmares as well. Zola describes the hideously bloated and mangled remains of drowning victims as they are observed by callous or indifferent onlookers. It is both chilling and a tremendous piece of writing. And the tension is maintained throughout the final third of the book leading to the final climax with meticulously well-metered prose. This guy knew how to write.

Thérèse Raquin depicts human beings at their absolute worst. Beneath the veneer of these middle class people lurk the hearts of savage beasts. Indeed, middle class gentility is scathingly rebuked to the point of being so over the top that it becomes almost comic. Maybe I'm a jaded twenty-first century reader who sees the middle class as too easy a target for such savage treatment. Perhaps I'm a bit nonplussed by Zola's oversized, overflowing coffers of boiling vitriol. I can't deny that Thérèse Raquin is an important novel that helped pave the way for modernism, the psychological novel, Jean Paul Sartre and Film Noir, but I can deny myself the anguish of a second read without much hesitation. My official verdict: Very good, but sheesh!

Download Thérèse Raquin from Project Gutenberg

"Dubliners" by James Joyce

 

James Joyce 1882-1941

For several weeks, we've been tracing the development and influence of naturalism, a literary movement that broke with the conventions of Victorian prose style. Naturalism is a crucial link between nineteenth century prose and the development of modernism that defined literature in the twentieth century. Naturalist prose introduced a more streamlined writing style and explored taboo themes and portrayed people, their motivations, behavior and the environment in which they exist in a more objective and realistic way.

First, we looked at Irish author George Moore's novel Esther Waters, a book that took a frank, unflinching look at the life of a single, illiterate mother in nineteenth century London. Moore questioned entrenched cultural beliefs about poverty, morality, religion and the social and economic hardships faced by the poor. We also explored Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a rags-to-riches story (and vice versa) that openly questioned the American dream of economic and social mobility that equates ambition with virtue and poverty with moral failing.

Then we backtracked to explore A Sportsman's Sketches, a collection of short stories by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, a book that explored the harsh realities of life for Russian peasants during the waning days of Russia's feudal landowning system. After that, we traced the naturalist influence to another of George Moore's works, The Untilled Field (1903), another collection of short stories about life in Ireland about twenty years before independence that was directly influenced by Turgenev's book. In this work, Moore's stories show us a nation searching for its identity as the Catholic church's intrusive influence on the everyday lives of Irish peasants, deeply rooted economic problems and widespread emigration to America threatened Ireland's future.

Now we come to another collection of stories that follow the naturalist thread in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), a book that helped to secure Joyce's reputation as one of the world's most accomplished and influential authors while putting Ireland on the world cultural map. George Moore set the table for the emergence of a unique, distinctly Irish literary voice which turned out to be that of James Joyce. His work helped pave the way for modernism, a stylistic tide that spilled well beyond Ireland's geographical and cultural borders to influence world literature. Not bad for a guy who struggled for a decade to even get his stories published.

Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce

The mere mention of his name puts fear in the hearts of undergraduates, but don't worry; Dubliners is the most readable of James Joyce's works, although his prose is densely packed with meaning more implied than stated. By withholding information through the literary device of gnomon, the parts that are missing tell the real story. As a result, these stories break with narrative tradition by not resolving dramatically. He doesn't tell you what to think of the characters he draws, but relies on your ability to draw your own conclusions. Joyce would further shed conventions as his stream-of-consciousness narrative style became more pronounced in the novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. a brilliant but notoriously difficult and inscrutable work that still confounds even the most adventurous of readers. Nine out of ten people who claim to have read it are trying to impress and/or seduce you. (Just for the record, I haven't read it. I glimpsed a few pages once and became a little dizzy for a day or so, but I'm okay now.)

Whereas Turgenev's Sketches depicted the Russian peasantry as oppressed by an inherently unjust feudal system and Moore's book targeted the Catholic church's stranglehold on the mind and soul of the Irish peasant and explored the roots and consequences of Ireland's cultural identity crisis, Joyce concentrates on the day-to-day life of those in the urban Irish middle class. Many of the same forces are at work in Dubliners, but the conflicts are played out in psychological terms as each story gives us a view of the world from the main character's limited but revealing perspective. Joyce's protagonists wrestle with existential problems like inertia, crises of conscience, mental illness, alcoholism, family dysfunction and abuse, political conflicts, social ambition, piety, marriage and death--a veritable laundry list of issues dealt with in the next hundred years of fiction.

Dubliners contains thirteen unrelated stories, but taken linearly, these stories span the major stages of life from childhood to old age.  Each major character undergoes an epiphany about themselves and their circumstances, Sometimes these personal revelations are realistic, sometimes misguided, but always profound. I could write an essay about each of the stories, but here I'll limit myself to an overview of some of the stories and their themes.

Right from the get go, there's something distinctive about Joyce's words, as though his stories were pieces of sculpture. In Dubliners, fiction, like sculpture, is a subtractive medium, and we are to make sense of what the author hasn't taken away.. In "The Sisters", the passing of a mentally ill priest gives a young boy who was close to him his first experience of death and family and friends speak only indirectly about the man's troubles. Two boys encounter an odd. possibly perverted old man while playing hookey from school in "The Encounter", which deals with childhood friendships. Gnomon is consistently at work. We're as much in the dark about what befell the dying priest as the young boy, although as readers, we pick up on clues that he would miss; something sinister is implied in a way that has greater impact than explicitly stating it.

Young, idealistic love is the subject of "Araby", in which a teenage boy experiences the painful self consciousness of infatuation in a culture of sexual repression. His trip to a fair to buy her a gift ends in frustration and he returns home empty handed. The depth of his disappointment is in proportion to his unrealistic idea of love. This is the first of several foiled journeys that bring characters back full circle when they try to leave or change their circumstances.

In "Eveline", a young woman desperately seeking to escape her abusive father by marrying a sailor and sailing for Buenos Aires lacks the courage to follow through. Joyce draws our attention to descriptive details of her home and her possessions which give clues to her history and inner struggles.  In "A Little Cloud", unrealized dreams of a literary life haunt Little Chandler after dining with a friend who is a successful writer. He returns to his home in a foul mood, reminded of the shackles placed on him by his wife and child. Chandler's responses to his environment--in this case, drinking a bit too much in the presence of his former friend and being driven to the brink of brutality by his infant son's cries--tell us more than any explicit account of his state of mind. His fate, it would seem, was sealed by decisions he made long ago.

Three stories deal with social ambition. "The Race" is about a young man eager to impress his new, rich friends from school and to be successful in business. In "A Mother", Mrs. Kearny alienates those around her by being pushy as she zealously advocates for a promised performance fee at a charity variety show on her daughter's behalf. The proprietor in "The Boarding House" and her daughter craftily manipulate a lodger into marriage. It's interesting to note that he protagonists of these stories are, not surprisingly, the least inclined to struggle with the moral implications of their actions, and so we gain perhaps a little less insight into their thoughts and feelings.

Joyce's well chosen words evoke a nausea-free pathos that makes potentially melodramatic situations poignant rather than pathetic. Death, grief and guilt are dealt with squarely in "A Painful Case" when a circumspect middle aged man rebuffs a married woman's advances and is stricken with remorse when he learns of her pitiful, alcohol-fueled demise a few years later. His efforts to try to do the right thing result in doing a far greater injury. "Counterparts" depicts a scrivener's demise from drink and the resultant domestic abuse frankly and directly. He is a man paralyzed by his habits that endanger his job, his finances and his family. Anyone raised as an Irish Catholic, practicing or otherwise, can recognize the heavy burden of living with the moral implications of even well intentioned actions gone wrong, and no one portrays the psychological clash of intention versus consequences mixed with grief and alcoholism in quite the way Joyce does.

Three stories deal with community life, specifically the uncertainty and insecurity that arises when people see themselves in relation to those around them and whose actions fall well short of their ideals and beliefs. "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" deals most directly with the struggle for Irish independence as a small group of men campaigning for an upcoming election find themselves lacking in the looming shadow of deceased Nationalist leader Charles Parnell. "Grace" finds a group of middle class men giving lip service to the merits of temperance and spiritual values in the most agreeable, superficial and often erroneous ways. During a spiritual retreat intended to renew their commitment to spiritual values, even the priest reinforces their limited vision of themselves and their responsibilities. "The Dead", a novella-length story, is the most famous piece from this collection due to numerous adaptations for film and the stage. At a Christmas party (celebrating, in fact, the Feast of the Epiphany--get it?), Gabriel is painfully self conscious, so concerned with how others see him that after hearing his wife tell him the story of a former lover who died young, he considers whether dying young before having the chance to accrue more misdeeds and blunders is better than growing old.

This was a difficult work to put in a nutshell, but reading it is pure pleasure. Joyce's work has been analyzed to the hilt by many folks far more qualified that I am. There's no shortage of material about Joyce's works out there. If this book speaks to you, there are plenty of resources out there.

Next time, we'll conclude our series about naturalism by looking at Thérèse Raquin, the 1867 novel by naturalist granddaddy Émile Zola.

Download Dubliners from Project Gutenberg

"The Untilled Field" by George Moore

Last time, we traced the roots of realism and naturalism back to one of its sources, Russian author Ivan Turgenev. On this St. Patrick's Day, we're going to look at what  effect Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches had on the development of the Irish short story, specifically George Moore's 1903 collection of stories, The Untilled Field.


The Untilled Field (1903) by George Moore

First, a subjective opinion: This is an excellent collection of stories and it's a crying shame that George Moore's work has been so neglected. His prose is perfectly measured and his characters draw you in. There is subtle wit,  real compassion and outrage within its pages, and the way the stories dovetail one another gives a satisfying feeling of completeness. If it were a pop-up book, opening its pages would reveal an intricate, interwoven whole, like a piece of Irish literary origami.

George Moore was allegedly influenced by Ivan Turgenev's collection of short stories, A Sportsman's Sketches, a book focused on the plight of the Russian peasantry at the hands of landowners in a feudal system that was nearing its close. The narrator of those stories is detached, the characters are allowed to tell their own stories amidst lush natural surroundings, and the stories themselves are loosely connected by a single narrator.

By contrast, Moore's book centers around the plight of the Irish peasantry at the turn of the twentieth century--a time of great change as Ireland struggled for independence and to form its own identity. Turgenev's influence can be seen more in concept and form than in style. Both works center around the lives of oppressed rural people in a time of great economic and social change. The narrative voice shifts, although detachment is maintained, symbolism and allegory are frequently employed, and taken together, the stories are more cohesive. 

The presence of nature so prevalent in A Sportsman's Sketches is not as important here. Rather, priests and parishioners are engaged in a struggle of reason versus instinct that typifies Ireland's problems. Landlordism was outlawed in the year this book was published. Ireland had very little industrial infrastructure and much poverty, and its population seemed to move en masse to America for lack of opportunity and want of personal freedom. Incongruously, new churches were being erected as villages emptied. Clerical life was a way to escape poverty, but as the church acquired more and more land, built more churches and absorbed more of the remaining population into celibacy, the prospect of repopulating and rebuilding Ireland looked dim. Moore openly questions the church's role in Ireland's decline and looks at the lives of those who still remained.

There are thirteen stories here. "In the Clay" begins the collection, telling the story of John Rodney, a Paris-trained sculptor who has been commissioned by Father MacCabe to create a statue of the Virgin and Child for a new church. He enlists a nude model for the work, the beautiful seventeen-year-old Lucy Delaney, the daughter of a cheese-monger. Unaware that artists need to use live models for even sacred works, MacCabe, while visiting Rodney's studio, recognizes Lucy's face when he sees the work in progress and informs her parents. Rodney enters his studio to find the statue destroyed, suspecting the priest, but learning that it was in fact Lucy's brothers who defaced it after overhearing their parents and the priest discussing her involvement. Rodney, convinced that puritanical Ireland is no place for an artist, decides to leave his home country for good. This sets the tone of the book: As Ireland struggles for a new beginning, the best and brightest are driven from its shores by attitudes and practices out of step with the changing modern world. This story and "The Way Back" begin and end the collection, the latter providing some closure on what happened to the artist and his model after leaving Ireland for London.

"Some Parishoners" is about Father Maguire, an overly zealous priest who has taken it upon himself to police his parishioners, decrying their fancy for dance and drink from the altar, confronting and separating men and women from walking together and even arranging marriages between those in his care whom he considers to be disruptive to the moral order of the community--usually beautiful and outspoken single women.  Maguire charges impoverished villagers exorbitant fees for performing marriage ceremonies, mostly to raise money for the construction of a new church. Biddy, an elder chicken farmer, has managed to save enough money to pay for a stained glass window in the new structure. Her fixation on the new window is a source of irritation, but the rapturous visions she sees when the window is installed pays dividends by drawing attention and prestige to the parish. We see a priest detached those he serves and whose priorities are skewed away from their spiritual health and towards the solvency of his parish.

"Julia Cahill's Curse" is another story of one priest's failed plan to protect his parish from the influence of a beautiful and independent woman. "The Exile" and "Home Sickness" deal with the tantalizing allure of America and the beckoning of a new life that make the here and now of Ireland even more unbearable. "Letter to Rome" is a charming and dryly funny story of a priest who decides that the best solution to Ireland's problems is to allow priests to marry. Reasoning that a population with an inordinate number of celibates faces a very limited future, he writes a letter to the Pope asking to give his idea consideration. "So On He Fares" is a touching story of a little boy who leaves his abusive mother to become a river bargeman, only to return home a decade later to find another little boy with the same name living in his place, and "The Clerk's Quest" takes the form of a parable in which a middle aged office clerk is driven to ruin after becoming obsessed with a woman he knows only through her perfumed checks.

The longest and most engaging story is "The Wild Goose", in which the internal struggle of Ireland to come to terms with itself are embodied in the relationship between a man and a woman. Ned Carmady is an Irish American journalist who returns to Ireland with high hopes for reform after his experiences in Cuba fighting against the Spanish. He meets Ellen Cronin, a beautiful, educated and religious girl who sees in Ned the potential of being Ireland's political savior. They marry, and Ellen begins to prime him for public office, writing speeches for her husband. But a rift develops between them about religion. Carmody sees the clergy as the source of Ireland's troubles, and as his anticlerical viewpoint becomes more publicly pronounced, his marriage suffers. Their failed marriage is an apt allegory for the schism that troubles the country.

Through Moore's eyes, we see a nation unable to reconcile its Gaelic roots, language and traditions with a religion that seeks to blot out its proud pagan past at the expense of the present. Both the Catholic church and America cast long, imposing shadows over the Irish people, forcing them to move into the light by either embracing or abandoning their country and their faith.

The Untilled Field was written twenty years before Irish independence, giving us several views of complex economic and cultural forces in at the heart of Irish rural life. In 1914, James Joyce would publish Dubliners, another collection of short stories that looks at the urban middle class and their struggle to forge a new identity and understanding of itself. We'll look at that short story collection next time.

Download The Untilled Field from Project Gutenberg

Naturalist Roots: Ivan Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches"

In the last post, we looked at a handful of books written in the naturalist style. Now I'd like to trace the realist and naturalist influence back to one of its sources, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev.


A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) by Ivan Turgenev

Nineteenth century Russian books have a reputation for being long, difficult works with far too many characters and impenetrable cultural contexts that might bewilder new readers. But if you're curious about Russian fiction, this collection is a good place to start. The individual stories in A Sportsman's Sketches are intense and entertaining, and taken together they form a satisfyingly unified whole. While this book is very much of its time, the sheer humanity of its characters cuts across cultural and temporal divides. Much of what you need to know about history to appreciate this collection can be found within the text itself.
 
Turgenev wrote about a feudal system in decline; landowners were once prosperous, but the glory days have long since passed. Many once thriving estates are crumbling and the descendants of wealthy landowning families find it increasingly difficult to manage their properties successfully--often because of their own shortsightedness. 

Pastoral Russia is as much a character in these stories as anyone residing in its woods. Turgenev's vibrant descriptions of the natural world are some of the most lovely and engaging of their kind in all of literature, and his style and tone had a pragmatic as well as aesthetic advantage; by employing the naturalist device of the disinterested narrator, he was able to get provocative ideas past the censors to speak directly to his audience about the many injustices of Russia's feudal system.

Each piece is about the people the narrator meets and the stories he hears while hunting in the countryside. In "Raspberry Water", the narrator encounters two elderly men fishing, both former house serfs, who embody the region's fading past. Styopushka, a homeless former serf is humble and directionless, foraging for his daily bread and living on the former estate of a wealthy landowner through the charity of a peasant family who currently lives there. Tuman (Russian for "frog"), is a freed house serf who tells stories about his former master's abundant estate and his sometimes severe manner with the servants. While talking to the two old men, another serf, the middle aged Vlass, arrives home from a long journey visiting his landlord in Moscow. Joining the conversation, he laments the recent death of his son and his inability to get his absentee landlord to allow him to move to a smaller piece of land that he can afford. His landlord reprimands him for not taking the issue to the bailiff first. Vlass' story gives us a glimpse of the plight of peasant farmers who can barely make a living under the feudal system and were subjected to many abuses by landowners and their employees. In "Bailiff" we learn about the kind of blackmail and manipulation often committed by those who manage the landowners' estates, giving us a pretty good idea of why, in the earlier story, Vlass was reluctant to deal directly with his master's employee.

"Two Country Gentlemen" gives us a closer look at the landed gentry. Retired General Hvalinsky is a man of austere habits with a serious countenance who is an inept manager of his affairs. He keeps his inferiors at arm's length and supplicates his betters, but prefers to play cards with his inferiors. He enjoys his status, but is self-conscious about appearing to be too ostentatious. The opposite is true of Mardary Apollonitch, a jovial, friendly man with only a superficial interest in the affairs of his large estate. He is a landowner of the old style to whom appearances are of primary importance while in stark contrast, his servants live in squalid, ruinous huts overlooking his property.

Turgenev also brings in elements of traditional folklore in "Byezhin Prairie", a charming story about a group of boys by a campfire telling each other tales of faeries and ghosts. There is dark humor in these stories as well: "Lgov" is about a fishing trip gone wrong as a party of fisherman capsizes in a borrowed boat led a foolhardy fisherman named Vladimir.  "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District" lampoons the pretensions of the landowning elite through the story of one of their ranks who has realized the meaninglessness of his social standing, and "Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew" is a wryly comic story of a woman whose nephew is whisked away to St. Petersburg by a rich benefactor. He leaves his aunt's home as an art prodigy and returns as a boorish, lazy, drunken lout. Now that's realism!

The longest piece of this collection is the two part story found in "Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin" and the sequel, "The End of Chertopkhanov", It is a tale of misfortune and existential terror in the heart of a landowner whose family and fortunes are on the wane. In these stories can be found, part and parcel, the very stuff of Russian storytelling: destitution, death, torrid romance, a fine horse, obsession, loss, drunkenness and insanity.

I found a wonderful contextual clue while researching this book: A Sportsman's Sketches was published in the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both of these works highlighted the injustices of slavery. The popularity of Turgenev's collection helped to raise awareness of the plight of Russia's peasantry, leading to an abolition of serfdom in 1860. The realism of Stowe's novel brought the horror of the enslavement of blacks into the public consciousness of Americans, and the change in public opinion ultimately led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Both authors used clear language to communicate stark truths that influenced the social and economic trajectories of their respective countries. The combination of plain words, good intentions and a willing audience can actually affect real change.

This is, of course, a best case scenario. Individual results may vary.


Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg

Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg

A note on the digital edition: Project Gutenberg has continued to revise their catalog by creating digital editions that work better with modern eReader devices. Currently, this book exists in two volumes, the second of which has yet to be formatted for such devices although it is available in plain text that can be converted to other formats using free eBook authoring software like Calibre. Let's hope that this classic is reviewed and revised into a nice eBook that contains both volumes. They're very busy folks who are doing good work, so we'll give them a break.

Antique Poverty Part 2: Naturalist Novels

Every innovation, every new mode of expression, every attempt to expand the boundaries of art has met with stern opposition. Novel reading was not always seen as an activity worthy of the upstanding, moral middle class. Like most new and enjoyable things, novels were once seen as a gateway drug to immorality. The moral gatekeepers of the Victorian age had very definite ideas of what constituted acceptable literature--usually those works that reinforced their ideal vision of themselves as God-fearing, prudent, self-reliant and industrious people. These are not exactly the ingredients for compelling fiction, and fortunately for us, the most widely read books of the period tended to subtly (and often not so subtly) subvert and question these ideals within their pages despite the objections of prim moralists. By mid-century, strains of a more realistic view of the world began to find a way into mainstream fiction that increasingly expressed the need for social change.

These two novels are examples of naturalism, a movement that sought to overturn conventional Victorian morality and style in favor of more realistic characters, settings and stories that used more direct language. It's beginnings can be seen in the works of Russian author Ivan Turgenev and the works of French novelist Émile Zola.

The thematic breadth and scope of literature during this period expanded while prose became leaner and the narrative voice became more objective. The characters depicted in naturalist novels did real things that most people do, like have sex, drink, gamble, fight, murder, etc. Moreover, the naturalist movement gave an emerging voice to the plight of women, the poor and to other issues of social and economic inequality that characterized the Victorian era. Naturalists saw human behavior as inexorably tied to heredity, class and education, and the behavior of the characters they created were portrayed as natural and inevitable responses to their environments.

As might be imagined, this movement generated its share of controversy. French novels of the mid-nineteenth century were seen as far too saucy and frank for English and American readers, but their influence was to be found in the work of a new crop of reform-minded writers who directly addressed unpleasant truths while attempting to express the commonality of human suffering to a mainstream, middle class audience. Critics saw this new literature as sordid, but by the time these novels were written, naturalism was more or less familiar to readers in both England and the U.S.

These two novels are worth considering side by side:


Esther Waters (1894) by George Moore

Discovering the work of Irish author and playwright George Moore is like discovering a secret. He wrote many novels, short stories and plays, but Esther Waters is his most famous work. Moore's brand of naturalism got him into trouble with lending libraries that refused to circulate his books, but by 1894, the furor had died down and this novel was widely acclaimed.

It's the story of a poor London girl who, lacking any other option and hoping to get away from an abusive family life, goes into service in the home of a well-to-do family whose wealth comes from breeding and racing horses. Her deeply religious background doesn't prepare her for the reality of her new surroundings in which loose talk and drinking among her fellow servants and the gambling obsession that possesses nearly everyone in the household regardless of rank, stands in contrast to the moral lessons of her youth. While below stairs, she falls in love with William, a fellow servant who promises to marry her as soon as his bets start to bring in money, but instead leaves her with child and runs off with a wealthy cousin of the household. She is then forced to fend for herself while caring for her son in a world that has little sympathy for an illiterate servant girl with a bastard child.

Esther's story mirrors the real life struggles of single English mothers of the age. In deciding to keep her son, she has taken on a burden that so stigmatizes her as to make it difficult for her to make even a meager living. She and those around her struggle against a rigid class system that allows for little social and economic mobility. Gambling seems the only chance to escape poverty and toil, but more often it leads to short term gains followed by long term ruin. Esther's religious beliefs become increasingly incongruous to her, representing to her an ideal which she finds it impossible to live up to and difficult to reconcile with the reality she faces.

But this is no artless social criticism or political tract; this is a very finely crafted novel written with great sensitivity and economy. Moore's language is direct and to the point, and that precision is what allows the story to flow in a way that would be impossible with language encumbered by dense Victorian style. This is also a novel that manages to bring itself full circle from beginning to end without capitulating to public taste for a happy ending. And yet, we get closure. That's good writing, and this book is worth reading.

Download Esther Waters from Project Gutenberg


Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser

In contrast to the Englishness of Esther Waters, Sister Carrie is a decidedly American story. Carrie is a middle class girl from rural Wisconsin who goes to Chicago with vague visions of wealth and status, uses men she meets as the stepping stones to sophistication and material success, and becomes a renowned actress in New York. The second of these men, George Hurstwood, is a married manager of a private Chicago dining club who leaves his wife and children, steals ten thousand dollars from the company safe and flees with Carrie, eventually settling in New York where, under an assumed name, they are married, albeit illegally.

As Carrie's star rises, Hurstwood finds it difficult to regain the status and wealth he once enjoyed in Chicago. As she becomes more confident and independent, Hurstwood sinks into depression and despair, increasingly relying on Carrie's new found success to support the household. He also gets a glimpse into the reality of the urban poor when he attempts to take a job as a scab streetcar driver during a labor strike. The two undergo a complete role reversal, and their contrasting experiences reflect the reality of millions trying to claw their way to the top or to regain the lives of status and leisure that have somehow slipped through their fingers.

Theodore Dreiser, once considered the premiere man of American letters in the early twentieth century, has fallen out of style. His writing is notoriously turgid, his dialogue can be stiff and unnatural. and his plots are generally underdeveloped and relentlessly linear. Yet this, along with his greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), are still read by American high school and college students. Why? Because he pulls no punches about the living and working conditions of the urban poor and the practical and moral dilemmas they faced. Sister Carrie breaks new ground, pitting the optimistic American cultural ideal of material reward for hard work and industry against the gritty, realistic urban backdrop of toil, poverty and degradation that existed at the turn of the twentieth century. Social mobility was--or was at least believed to be--achievable in America, where the ascribed status of family and rank had less meaning. Dreiser sees the pursuit of the American dream as an obsession that sacrifices moral reasoning for material gain in the name of virtue.

Sister Carrie is a novel that is very much of its time, and while it may not have aged well in some respects, it still has something to teach us. The American argument of self reliance versus social conscience still rages more than a century later, and along with the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser's work serves as a fairly accurate map of American cultural DNA. George Moore goes even further in Esther Waters by examining the incongruent demands of the Protestant work ethic--a doctrine at the core of American values--in light of the grim reality of those without the necessary breeding or education to escape their situation.

Download Sister Carrie from Project Gutenberg


Here are a few other good ones:

McTeague (1899) by Frank Norris

An odd, dark story about greed and animal instinct run amok. This novel has perhaps the greatest ending of all time. This book was adapted for the screen by Erich von Stroheim in the notorious Hollywood epic, Greed (1924), a film widely considered to be one of the greatest silent movies ever made. I can take or leave this novel, but that ending really does pack a wallop.

Download McTeague from Project Gutenberg


The Jungle (1909) by Upton Sinclair

This novel depicts the plight of immigrant workers in the Chicago meat packing industry, the inhuman nightmare of wage slavery and corrupt politics. The reading public's attention was more focused on the unsanitary conditions of food processing rather than the dire living conditions of those who had to work those awful jobs, so while a success, it kind of backfired. Like many Americans, I was forced to read this book in high school. Not for the squeamish.

Download The Jungle from Project Gutenberg


The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London

A story about a domesticated dog who is captured to serve as a sled dog in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. This is a truly timeless story of instinct and survival that is a fabulous read. It's also another book that American students are familiar with. Funny how many naturalist novels have become staples of American education, if indeed American school children are even required to read books anymore.

Download The Call of the Wild from Project Gutenberg

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The free and easy availability of eBooks has pushed a few forgotten classics back into the spotlight. Unlike many, this one has remained more or less in print since its publication, largely because students of economics, history and sociology still read it, or at least parts of it. While it has mostly remained in print, it was not something the average bookseller was likely to stock on a regular basis. Like all of the books on The Overleaf, its public domain status means anyone who wants it can have it. That's a very good thing indeed, because it is a book well ahead of its time--one of those rare works that brings together elements of an original concept, cited research, accessible writing and adept storytelling. How does one begin to describe a book that is so wide ranging? I guess we're about to find out…


Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) by Charles MacKay

Scottish journalist and author Charles MacKay makes a compelling case for nonconformity in a comprehensive skeptic's almanac that spotlights human gullibility and its widespread effects on the reason and sanity of populations and cultures. MacKay writes, "Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek for remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and ignorance of the future—the doom of man upon this sphere, and for which he shews his antipathy by his love of life, his longing for abundance, and his craving curiosity to pierce the secrets of the days to come." 

This passage sums up the book's scope. All of the manias, crises, wars, fads and trends seem to fall into one or more of these categories. He avoids matters of religion, wryly commenting in his introduction that questions of religion and mass delusion would provide enough material "sufficient to occupy a volume" of its own. Indeed. Apart from the Crusades and the craze for relics in the Catholic church, he largely stays away from confronting religion outright.

In the most famous section of this book, he examines two financial booms in England and France in the early eighteenth century that were in both cases quelled by the rampant insider trading of an impossibly corrupt aristocracy driven by their zeal to get rich quick. These two case studies are still read by students of economics, and anyone who lived through the real estate bubble that led to the world economic crisis of 2008 will find it hard to suppress a knowing smirk. He also touches on The Netherlands' Tulip Mania crisis, although the astronomical rise in the price of tulips is now believed by modern historians to have been substantially less disruptive to the Dutch economy than previously thought.

Historically, claiming to circumvent the time-honored existential ills of death, toil and the mystery of the future has proven to be highly lucrative, and there was never a shortage of charlatans who sought to profit from any eager seekers they could dupe. Scores of anecdotes are offered of the men and women who were driven to madness and/or destitution in the desire to manufacture gold, talk to the dead and see into the future. But the most fascinating sketches MacKay draws are those of the world's most accomplished quacks, tricksters and schemers who found ingenious ways to seduce people in high and low places to part with their money for unrealized promises. The intrigues and adventures of rogues and rubes make for some great reading.

As MacKay merrily debunks soothsayers and prophets like Nostradamus, "magnetizers" who sound eerily like bogus New Age "healers", witch hunting, haunted houses, dream interpreters and the insane pastime of deuling to settle petty differences, one begins to see hints of the then emerging discipline of sociology via the work of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. Unlike the works of those three heavy hitters, MacKay's book was written to entertain, and his language is lively and accessible to modern readers.

The extensive piece that depicts the Crusades as a humanitarian crisis caused by a mass delusion is an excellent piece of writing that is well ahead of its time. Errors in collective judgement often lead to ridiculous, painfully comic results, but MacKay was clearly dismayed and appalled by senseless human suffering and envisioned a day when society would grow beyond its tendency to rashly embrace spurious truths and its capacity to destroy each other in the process. Well, it's 2013 and we're still waiting, Chuck. I feel you, man.

MacKay's anecdotal style means that you don't have to swallow this book whole; it can be read piecemeal without any loss of context or continuity. Truth is, you're better off taking it bit by bit. It's as dense as a cheesecake, touching on many subjects over roughly two thousand years of history--so much good stuff, in fact, that I'm probably not doing this book justice in writing about it. But believe me, It's endlessly fascinating and lots of fun. A chapter of this book can cleanse your literary palette between novels or provide a diversion while riding the train to work or waiting for your plane to land. It's much more fun than the in-flight magazine.

A note on the digital edition: The lack of illustrations in the eBook edition is a bit unsettling, since the captions describing them remain, taunting and frustrating readers with the ghosts of rich and compelling images unseen. Project Gutenberg has done a great job of going back into their catalog to refurbish titles to make them play nice with today's eReader devices, often including complete texts with images. This book is a prime candidate for an overhaul. I want to see those pictures!

Next time, I'll get back to writing about novels.

Download Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from Project Gutenberg