Two Years Before the Mast

The Pilgrim

It's interesting that I've randomly chosen this famous memoir of a life at sea after an in-depth exploration of realism in Russian short stories. But this book, although a work of non-fiction (as memoirs once were in bygone days), reads like realist prose to me. It is unembellished, plain spoken realism written without frills, without clutter, without unnecessary adornment. And the simple words and economical phrasing and sentences add up to something far greater than its constituent parts.

Two Years Before the Mast (orig: 1840; this edition: 1911) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

There were hundreds of books written in the nineteenth century that document ship journeys, explorations, hunting expeditions and the like, many of them self important, long winded, monotonous, self-aggrandizing tomes of little value. Fortunately for us, Dana's book is way better than that.

Richard Dana was a sophomore at Harvard when he came down with the measles. The disease affected his sight and made it difficult for him to study, so he decided he would take two years off to work as a common sailor aboard a merchant ship, believing the air and hard work would do him some good after his illness. He set sail from Boston in the summer of 1834 aboard the Pilgrim, a merchant ship that transported goods to the California coast and to return packed with cowhides. But of course, back in the days before the Panama canal, if you wanted to sail from the east coast to the west coast of North America with a boat full of stuff, you had to go the long way, all the way around Cape Horn at the very tip of South America, which took several months and exposed sailors to some very harsh and dangerous conditions. The tale of the journey back is hairier and more riveting than the journey out, when nature's great power, beauty and fury are aptly described with a sense of respectful awe.

He wrote about the perils and pleasures of life at sea and gives us character sketches of his fellow sailors with a keen eye and ear for detail and dialect. He also describes the indignities and abuses that merchant sailors were subjected to by greedy and incompetent captains, unscrupulous agents and predatory recruiters who lured the ignorant to perilous journeys, often stripped of their rightful wages and kept in servitude. In fact, exposing these wrongs was his primary purpose in writing the book, which became an enormous success, bringing the issues facing merchant sailors to the attention of a wide audience and making its author world famous.

Dana and the crew spent most of their time going back and forth collecting hides between Mexican ports at San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, San Pedro and San Diego, and each port as he describes it is very different than the cities we know today. Back then, they were sleepy, somewhat desolate places at the very edge of civilization in the final years of Mexican rule. He engaged in backbreaking work carrying thousands of hides from shore to ship for the journey back east, spent a few months ashore in San Diego curing and preparing those hides for transit with a group of Sandwich Islanders he came to love and respect, and walked through the small towns near the ports, meeting people from other cultures and observing their habits and ways of living. Two Years Before the Mast is a document of what life was like on the California coast in the years before America's final westward expansion and is of great value to historians.

At one point, Harvard educated guy that he was with bright hopes for his future, Dana expresses concern about rumors that his engagement at sea might last as long as four years, After having spent so much time aboard the Pilgrim learning and adopting the the coarse ways of sailors, he feared that he might not be able to re-enter polite society and thus become a sailor for life.  As it happened, his engagement lasted only two years and he was able to retain his agile mind and gentlemanly demeanor, thus managing to write a cohesive narrative without using the word "argh!" in every other sentence. Dana managed to escape this fate by switching ships and returning home on the Alert, a ship that was much nicer and better run than the Pilgrim, whose captain was given to gruffness and the occasional unprovoked flogging.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.  1815-1882

Dana's writing is literature of the highest order. His natural style reveals a recognizably American voice--factual and unsentimental, yet full of emotional intensity.  Read Moby Dick right after this and you'll see what an effect Dana's account had on Melville and subsequently on American literature.

Here's a good example of his considerable descriptive powers. At one point, Dana is given shore leave and writes about witnessing the funeral of a child in San Pedro. This passage wouldn't be out of place in a realist novel:

"From the beach we returned to the town, and, finding that the funeral procession had moved, rode on and overtook it, about half-way to the Mission. Here was as peculiar a sight as we had seen before in the house, the one looking as much like a funeral procession as the other did like a house of mourning. The little coffin was borne by eight girls, who were continually relieved by others running forward from the procession and taking their places. Behind it came a straggling company of girls, dressed, as before, in white and flowers, and including, I should suppose by their numbers, nearly all the girls between five and fifteen in the place. They played along on the way, frequently stopping and running all together to talk to some one, or to pick up a flower, and then running on again to overtake the coffin. There were a few elderly women in common colors; and a herd of young men and boys, some on foot and others mounted, followed them, or walked or rode by their side, frequently interrupting them by jokes and questions. But the most singular thing of all was, that two men walked, one on each side of the coffin, carrying muskets in their hands, which they continually loaded, and fired into the air. Whether this was to keep off the evil spirits or not, I do not know. It was the only interpretation that I could put upon it."

This is a straightforward account, yet so vivid and evocative, describing an emotionally charged scene with sparse language and an objective, even tone. This passage, and indeed the whole book, is written in a journalistic style yet positively breathes with compassion for the suffering of others. 

However, Dana does use a fair amount of antiquated nautical jargon here when describing his duties as a sailor and the finer points of how a crew of men work together to keep their ship afloat. But using your eReader's dictionary or making an occasional visit to Wikipedia to decode these terms is kind of fun. You get the hang of the shop talk after a couple of chapters.

This 1911 edition includes his son's forward and afterword, plus Dana's account of his return to his old haunts in 1859. Between his and his son's follow-up efforts, we're brought as up to date as we can be about the fate of the places, the people and the ships he sailed on and encountered. We also learn of Dana's lifelong commitment to protecting the human rights of oppressed people in his law practice and we learn of his commitment to the abolition of slavery. This is a book written for all the right reasons, giving us a rare view into history and of one man's conscience. Historical forces forged the destiny of the right man for the job, and the result is a fantastic book that combines the very best elements of a personal and historical account. Well done, sir.

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Russian Short Stories Part 7: Two Anthologies

The title of this post indidcates that this is part seven in my series on Russian short stories, but it's really part eight if you count my essay about Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches from last March (and it certainly should be counted because it's an absolutely essential book). Beginning with the next post we'll step away from Russian literature and explore some other great books for the sake of variety. We'll return to Russia now and then, though.

Here are two excellent anthologies of Russian short stories to wrap things up.


Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian (1898) by Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol & Tolstoy

This is a brief but very good Russian short story anthology that begins with "Mumu" a heart rending story by Turgenev from Torrents of Spring (1872). Pushkin's "The Shot" (1831), which is good example of the genius of this essential and influential author. Also included is the scary "St. John's Eve" (1831) by Gogol which we explored earlier in this series, and "An Old Acquaintance" (185?), a lesser known piece from Tolstoy's early years--an intriguing choice given the number of great stories he had penned by the time this volume was originally published. You really can't go wrong with a compilation of stories by these guys. Short but sweet and highly recommended.

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Best Russian Short Stories (1917) Compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer

"Everything is subordinated to two main requirements—humanitarian ideals and fidelity to life. This is the secret of the marvelous simplicity of Russian literary art."—Thomas Seltzer

In his introduction, American translator and publisher Thomas Seltzer claims this volume is the greatest collection of Russian short fiction available in English, and he'll get no argument from me; ninety six years later, it's still fantastic. This volume presents a wide range of Russian authors, including a number of names that were famous at the turn of the twentieth century and are now unjustly forgotten. That's a shame, because the lesser known selections are good stuff indeed. Seeing stories by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov juxtaposed by the works of Andreyev, Sologub, Saltykov, Gorky, Garshin and others gives us a mostly linear, highly condensed genealogy of Russian belles lettres from roughly 1830 to 1910.

It begins with "The Queen of Spades" (1834) by Pushkin, Russia's first writer to achieve rock star status. It's a ripping story with wickedly dry humor and a knockout ending. Although not characteristically Russian in form, there are hints of emergent realism in Pushkin that would find a voice in the work of Gogol, whose famous story "The Cloak" (1842) is also included. Turgenev's "The District Doctor", excerpted from A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), is a tale of a country doctor's unconsummated love for a dying patient. "The Christmas Tree and the Wedding" (1848) is a darkly funny, refreshingly brief and surprisingly focused story from Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy's "God Sees the Truth But Waits" (1872) is a dire, heartfelt story of forgiveness and redemption that foreshadows his parables and religious writings after Anna Karenina.

"How a Muzhik Fed Two Officials" (18??) is a piece of sledgehammer satire by Saltykov about two brainless bureaucrats stranded on a desert island who are saved from starvation and toil by a peasant servant. On the surface "The Shades: A Phantasy" (18??) is about a dream in which a post-hemlock imbibing Socrates leads a deceased and devoutly conformist tanner out of Hades and toward the light of logic, leaving a pile of vanquished gods slain by reason and truth. This piece has obvious parallels to pre-revolutionary Russia that the Tsar's notoriously dim-witted censors had obviously missed. Vsevelod Garshin's "The Signal" (1877) contrasts passive and active modes of resistance to authority in the form of two track walkers who work for the Russian railroad. Garshin writes in a concise, elegant, thoroughly realist prose that wastes no words yet spares few details. One of my faves.

There are three stories included by Chekhov: "The Darling" (1899) is one which we explored together recently. "The Bet" (1889) is a tale about a man who bets an acquaintance two million rubles that the latter would be unable to withstand fifteen years of solitary confinement. Rod Serling adapted this story in his screenplay for "The Silence", a famous episode of "The Twilight Zone" that aired in 1961. "Vanka" (1886) is a tale about a young boy writing home to his grandfather begging to return home from his apprenticeship for the many abuses he has had to endure. These stories are fine examples of how Chekhov was able to condense complex stories and characters in a few pages that might take other authors a whole book to unfold.

Fyodor Sologub's "Hide and Seek" (19??) is one of the most disheartening, eerie and freaked out stories you're likely to read about the death of a child. You should read it because it's well worth reading, but you might want to avoid doing so before you go to sleep at night. (I speak from a position of experience). I. Potapenko's "Dethroned" (18??) is a worthy effort, but this story about a high society woman's comeuppance seems a bit trite when presented alongside the moral gravitas of the other stories. Sergey Semyonov's "The Servant" (18??) is an earnest morality tale told with a nod to Tolstoy while still asserting its own voice. 

Maxim Gorky's stories can be hit-and-miss for brilliance, but this collection has two of his best works of short fiction, "An Autumn Night" (1895) and "Her Lover" (1897). Leonid Andreyev's "Lazarus" (19??) is one of the most pleasing discoveries to be found here. It tells what happened to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead by Christ. Time no longer has meaning for him and he wanders through the world of the living with a hollow, vacant and contagious stare that fils everyone he meets with a similar feeling of hopelessness and existential dread. This is another one of my favorite discoveries in the collection.

Artzybashev's "The Revolutionist" is a chilling story about a teacher whose conscience prompts him to take armed action against the military after witnessing a group of soldiers execute a young boy and watching a public whipping of a group of peasants. Lastly, in Kuprin's "The Outrage" (19??), a group of thieves goes before a Russian court to demand that they be represented against slanderous charges by the press that they, professional and honest thieves who take pride in their craft, were in any way responsible for recent pogroms against the Jews in their community. This is well wielded satire in the comic tradition of Gogol, delivering irony with much moral force. 

This is a GREAT collection and you should download it immediately and start reading. So says I.

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I hope you enjoyed our journey into Russian literature by way of the short story. As I've said, we'll return to Russia again as time goes by. Next time, I think we'll look at a vintage piece of non fiction.

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Russian Short Stories Part 6: Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov 1860-1904

Another blog post in this series, another master Russian short story author to Chekhov our list. Don't worry--that's the worst of the bad puns I'm likely to use on this blog.

In truth, we could devote a whole series of essays to Chekhov alone. His prose is constructed like a star: dense, full of gravity, tending to draw you in. His writing is underscored by a mature, highly concentrated realism--detailed, yet with a keen economy of words. The stories themselves use plain language and on first glance appear to be straightforward in terms of premise and plot (where there is one to be found), but within these compact pieces can be found a depth and complexity that rivals the very best--and much longer--novels. These stories bear the watermark of the dramatist, drawing our attention to setting, mood, appearance and proxemics, giving us an inside view of the thoughts and motivations of his characters. In prose and drama, Chekhov is a master, and these stories represent a perfect combination of his talents.

Project Gutenberg has a thirteen volume set of stories available that represent some of the very best of Chekhov's five hundred sixty eight stories written before his untimely death in 1904 at the age of forty four. This is the first one, which is plenty to get you started.

The Darling and Other Stories (1917) by Anton Chekhov

English novelist and essayist E.M. Forster said that the five factors of human life are "birth, food, sleep, love and death". While Russian literature as a whole is keenly preoccupied with the last two, for Chekhov, love and death act as an ample springboard for exploring fundamentally human existential themes.

"The Darling" (1899) ss a famous story that is said to be the author's favorite in his sizable canon. Olenka is a woman who takes on the attitudes and opinions of the men in her life. When married to a theater owner, she works tirelessly to help her husband run his business and shoulders his concerns, repeating his words and taking on his view of life. After his death, she takes up with a man who runs a lumber business and after that, a veterinarian, always the backbone of support and always taking on their concerns and ideas for her own. When paired with someone, she feels a sense of purpose and when she finds herself between beaus, she feels empty and rudderless. While this is certainly a portrait that rings true with our perceptions of a nineteenth century woman, I think Chekhov says more about human nature and the longing for love and identity than he does about women in particular. Her chameleonic ways help her to cling to love in the persistent shadow of death.

In "Ariadne" (1895), we find another recurring theme in Chekhov's work---that of love that is overly idealized by one who loves with more intensity than the other. In Chekhov, regretful, unevenly reciprocal pairings result and inequities of feeling bring unhappiness and frustration. This story tells of a man whose standards and longing for an unrealized, unrealistic love leads to bitterness when his expectations aren't realized. Interestingly, in "Three Years" (1895) the novella that takes up the entire second half of this collection, the inequity of feeling between a married couple at the beginning of their relationship leads to a familiarity and negotiation of love that takes place over time. More about that later.

"Polinka" (1887) is a story that lacks plot and resolution, giving us a sketch of a moment in life that is full of the dramatist's craft. We witness a lover's quarrel played out in a busy fabric shop. A young salesman is visited by the woman he loves, and the two engage in a double conversation--one full-voiced about the sale of fabrics for the sake of propriety, and one in hushed tones about the state of things between them. There quarrel concerns Polinka's dalliance with a young student who is trying to woo her and whom her jealous lover fears is only after her money. Amidst the shelves and talk of women's garments, in tones muted but harsh, he gives her a good dressing down for her infidelity and her naïveté. At the crux of their conflict is a struggle between gentility and commonness, both as the subject of their disagreement and in the way they navigate their very private conflict in a public place. One can easily envision this scene on a stage, which is why the story works so well.

In "Anyuta" (1886) a medical student wants to ditch his lover and caretaker at the end of the academic term. We learn a great deal about his feeling toward her in one instance when he draws the outline of her ribs on her skin as an aid to his study, treating her in essence like a cadaver. Chekhov also draws our attention to how physically cold she is and the fact that her lips are turning blue like a corpse. The student even lends her out to an artist upstairs who needs a model for his work. We learn that living in the apartments of medical students as a lover is a way of life for her, and although she is allowed to stay after a tearful protest, we can find the resolution only a temporary one. This is the kind of deftly wielded symbolism for which the author is known. We also get a glimpse of a typically Chekhovian woman who is brunette, pale, 5' 5'', with large eyes, deep sadness, possible neurosis, unbearable longing and often a fatal flaw or at least an unfortunate circumstance.

A woman finds herself torn between the man she loves and the man she marries in "The Two Volodyas" (1893). After an outing with these two men ends up in a few too many drinks, the conflicted and unhappy Olga, once a socialite given to parties and courting, considers her miserable fate. She orders the carriage to stop at a church to visit her sister who has become an orthodox nun. After the visit, she ponders the possibility of finding a deeper meaning in life to escape from her present situation. She seeks self abnegation, yet revels in the very forces of life that constrain her and supplicates herself to the advances and attentions of her lover with the same sense of desperation with which she supplicates herself to the inevitability of God, or at least the attainment of a higher moral purpose, although the latter is a hopelessly large chasm to cross. Another unhappy Chekhovian pairing that leads to misery and self recrimination.

When hope becomes its own heaviest burden, life tends to stand still as time slips by. Such is the case in the story, "The Trousseau" (1883), in which a man on an errand discovers a curious house with equally curious inhabitants--a plump, forty-ish mother, her plain daughter and an uncle who, ruined by drink and excluded from joining a monastery, lives in seclusion. The details of the structure of the house gives us a great deal of information about its inhabitants; It is cloaked by beautiful surrounding foliage and closed off from the outside world. Here, the mother and daughter sew garments for the daughter's trousseau or hope chest. The visitor's return to the same house reveals that little has changed, and the inhabitants have merely grown older and living in perpetual stasis. Such is also the case in "Talent" (18??), a story of three painters whose ambitions and dreams eclipse their output, and their dreams of success become an obstacle to their growth.

The title of "The Helpmate" (18??) refers to a solution to a theoretical chess problem in which both sides cooperate to checkmate Black. Here again we see a mismatched couple. A man marries for passion, but his joy fades soon after and he later contracts tuberculosis. A found telegram confirms his suspicions that his wife is cheating on him. He confronts her and she confesses. He offers her money and to let her go to her lover, but she refuses to leave him. A short while later, she accepts the money but stays. The husband is ruined in any case, brought down by mutual effort.

"An Artist's Story" (1896) is about a fairly well known painter who befriends a mother and two daughters. The younger daughter is lovely, sweet and demure, the older bold and opinionated, especially about social justice. The painter blows his chance with the younger daughter by criticizing the older daughter's involvement in local government and in her work helping to provide necessary services for the poor. She criticizes him for being a fine artist whose work lacks social relevance and fails to benefit society. He questions her motivations, claiming that such efforts will do no lasting good and will further hold the working people in bondage. In retaliation, the older daughter packs off her sister and mother to where she is out of the artist's reach. By asserting himself to the one,  he has lost the other. 

I loved "Three Years" (1895). the novella that concludes this collection. It is about a man whose family runs a successful dry goods business and who has a passionate unrequited love for Yulia, the daughter of a doctor who is treating his sister who is dying of cancer. Yulia agrees to marry him out of fear of ending up alone and lured by the promise of living a good life in Moscow. Both soon realize their mistake and are plunged into misery. The rest of the story is partially about the negotiative process that leads to the flowering of affection between the two. In truth, this is a much more complex story that could easily merit its own essay. Love and death figure prominently in these characters' motivations. We get intimate portraits of their backgrounds and family relations in a way that points toward themes fully explored in twentieth century fiction. Just trust me; read it for yourself. It's good stuff.

Download The Darling and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg

Next time, we'll finish our series on the Russian short story with a couple of anthologies and a few books about Russian literature.

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Russian Short Stories Part 5: The Hirsute Prose of Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1821-1881

In this series, we've been looking at major Russian authors through the lens of the short story. My initial idea was to use the medium of the short story to introduce the works of these authors in a way that was less intimidating than some of their major, hefty, door-stopping novels. The stories we've read so far have given us fairly accurate impressions of each author's style and themes expressed in their longer works. We've encountered the mannered and measured hesitance of Turgenev (whose white whiskers were neat and close-cropped), the humane passion and moral gravity of Tolstoy (perhaps the greatest of all the Russian bearded novelists), and the funny, surreal yet realistic social criticism of Gogol (who, as it happened, sported only a mustache). But what of Dostoyevsky, easily one of the hairiest and most prolific novelists of the nineteenth century? Here we are presented with a challenge.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's cups tended to overflow with a wealth of ideas that were often difficult to contain, even within the confines of a sprawling novel, much less so a short story. Combing through his work can be frustrating to new readers. In his novels, he sometimes tended to overwrite and his digressive tendencies can interrupt the flow of his narratives, leading us to conclude that he visited his editor about as often as he visited his barber. His characters are odd and quirky--and by that I mean, "erratic, impossibly neurotic, sometimes insanely paranoid and often completely dysfunctional". His output is uneven; the best of his works ranking among the very best in literature, and the rest, like unkempt facial hair, a jumbled mess.

This collection certainly gives us oodles of his style, warts and all, but his short stories only hint at what he would accomplish in the larger medium of the novel. This anthology collects stories from throughout Dostoyevsky's career. Here, we encounter the young, clean shaven writer of the late 1840s trying to find his way in the long shadow of the relatively hairless Gogol, and the author in his more hirsute years in which his works and talents, like his luxuriant, flowing beard, grew longer, richer and fuller. 

Short Stories (18??) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When a bachelor takes in a lodger at the insistence of his housekeeper, he gains a companion and a master storyteller in "An Honest Thief" (1848). After an incident in which his benefactor's greatcoat has been stolen, the lodger, Astafy Ivanovitch, tells a story about Emelyan Illyitch. an indigent alcoholic whom Astafy once took in despite his own considerable poverty, and whose tendency to pilfer personal property to buy his vodka became a catalyst for conflict and ultimately, redemption. This story is a psychological profile of a man whose criminal deeds conflict with his moral nature--a theme that would be more extensively explored in Crime and Punishment (1866). This is one of the best of the bunch.

"A Novel in Nine Letters" (1847) is a Gogol-like satire of St. Petersburg society that follows the correspondence of two apparently refined and educated men, but their gentile, mannered language gradually reveals the sinister, unscrupulous deeds of two card sharps, their dupe, and their squabbles over money. The sound premise and the highly condensed epistolary twists make it worth reading, although it seems a trifle too clever. It is said that Dostoyevsky wrote this condensed novel in one night. It shows.

"An Unpleasant Incident" (aka "A Nasty Story") (1862), is supreme, muscular satire written at a time in Russia's history when the serfs had been emancipated and social and political reforms were hotly debated. Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky, a young civil servant of high rank who gives lip service to lofty progressive social ideals while boozing it up with his skeptical peers puts his philosophy to the test for motives that fall considerably short of altruistic. After leaving the gathering late in the evening, he discovers that his driver is nowhere to be found and sets off on foot for home, relishing the chance to punish his servant in doing so. While walking home, he hears music and laughter coming from a modest house and asks a policeman who lives there. Pralinsky is informed that the party is a wedding celebration for one of the men who works under him.

Our protagonist seizes upon the opportunity to show his inferiors how benevolent and enlightened he is by crashing the party, imagining that everyone will be thrilled by such a magnanimous gesture. From this point on, a worst case scenario is played out in which his presence causes a considerable disruption, making the guests feel uncomfortable and resentful of his presence. As the evening goes on, Pralinsky veers out of control, wanting to leave but instead staying longer and drinking himself into a stupor. 

"An Unpleasant Incident" is the tale of one man's journey into a drunken state of cognitive dissonance. His actions, rather than endearing him in the eyes of his inferiors, make him appear to be the transparent, self important fool that he really is. The best targets for satire are people who can't bear the thought of being laughed at. Consequently, the laughs found here are painful and full of gravitas--the very best kind of laughs a satirist can evoke. This story is one of Dostoyevsky's most effective pieces of writing.

It's a pity the same can't be said for "Another Man's Wife" (1848), a rather hollow story of infidelity and jealousy taken to ridiculous extremes. This piece combines two such stories under one heading with rapid-fire dialogue and silly, stagey comedy more appropriately suited for Vaudeville than for a work of prose. This is the stuff of bedroom comedy. If Woody Allen had written it, it would actually be funny. but as it is, it comes off as corny and mindlessly broad. This is pure farce from a writer who could do infinitely better. All that yammering gave me a headache.

"The Heavenly Christmas Tree" (1876) is just odd, managing to combine metafiction with stark realism and sickly sweet sentimentality. A young boy leaves the side of his mother who has died from hunger and illness, only to succumb to death himself in the freezing cold and find his soul among the spirits of other children who dance gaily around Jesus' own Christmas tree. The bipolar contrast of grim reality and maudlin, treacly, greeting card grade sentiment is hard to take seriously. Puhl-eeeeze! But considering the fact that he often wrote just to put food in his mouth, we'll cut him some slack. A brief, pastoral sketch of the loving compassion of a serf for a frightened young boy follows in "The Peasant Marey" (1876). A bit sentimental, but the author portrays the peasant with dignity and humanity.

"The Crocodile" (1865) though silly, packs a satirical wallop. An educated, middle class couple go and their friend go to a public exhibit to see a real live crocodile. Somewhat disappointed by the animal's placidity and inertia, the husband teases and is consequently swallowed whole by the enormous reptile. His wife cries for the animal to be cut open to save her husband, but his voice is suddenly heard from within, describing what his new environment is like and asking his friend to elicit the help and advice of an elder mentor concerning what to do. The German owner of the crocodile refuses to slice open his animal for fear of financial ruin, and an ideological battle that pits capitalist versus socialist ideas ensues as all parties engage in high-minded dialogue rather than taking concrete action. The satire is laid on pretty thick, but the story is well wrought.

"Bobok" (1873) is an imaginative story of a young writer in search of new ideas who finds himself in a church graveyard after he idly follows a funeral procession. To his astonishment, he hears the voices of the graveyard's inhabitants talking, joking, gossiping and often irritating each other as they would have when they were alive, with their social and economic statuses, as well as their prejudices, intact. Great premise, great dialogue and very funny. 

The very last story is "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877), a tale in which a sullen, depressive man, convinced of the meaninglessness of life, decides to commit suicide. He has purchased a revolver, but has not yet found the courage to pull the trigger. One day, while out walking and the emptiness of life and planning to finally commit the deed, he is accosted by a frightened little girl who him to help her mother who is in grave danger. Although he refuses, upon his return to his apartment for yet another go at killing himself, he is unable to do so because his pity for another human being has been aroused by the little girl's suffering--an indication that life may not be meaningless after all. He then falls asleep and has an intense dream, or perhaps a vision.

In his dream, he actually shoots himself in the heart and is then whisked away by a mysterious being to a parallel Earth where mankind lives in perfect harmony, inspiring awe and reverence in our protagonist. He tells them tales of the Earth he knows, in which sorrow is prevalent and mankind treats one another with hatred, suspicion and selfishness. In so doing, he infects the inhabitants of this pristine world until they display all the worst human behaviors. He awakens aglow with spiritual revelation, eager to tell the world of the importance of doing good.

This is existentialism incarnate--a story in which moral behavior has to be incentivized by the promise of heavenly reward--a viewpoint that disavows altruism and reduces man to the level of maintaining moral order merely for the sake of self interest rather than for its own sake, making morality a choice rather than a mandate for beings endowed with free will. Heavy stuff, well ahead of its time. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, this is definitely food for thought, and so thoroughly written and filled with vivid images.

I'm sure you have a friend or family member whom you love dearly despite the fact that he or she often drives you completely crazy. That's how I feel about Dostoyevsky. But his work reflects the kind of guy he was, and he was truly brilliant, weird, inconsistent and a little nuts. But those flashes of brilliance and humanity are what make it impossible to dismiss him. His voice is passionate, challenging and alive, and that's what keeps me coming back.

Download Short Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky from Project Gutenberg

Next time, we'll look at Russia's preeminent short story writer, Anton Chekhov.

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Russian Short Stories Part 4: More Gogol

Combing through literature's past reveals a seemingly endless stream of fun surprises, and Gogol's stories certainly count among them. He is the first uniquely Russian writer, and his profound influence on subsequent literary giants cannot be overestimated. His all too short life leads one to wonder what further contributions he might have made had he lived past the age of forty three.  Gogol's writing sprawls across many genres, making his work difficult to categorize. His work reveals a writer both realist and romantic, balancing elements of the fantastic and supernatural with real life struggles and recognizable characters. It is a blend of the Ukrainian folkloric past and the modern-day Russia in which he lived. His humor lends perhaps the most humanizing touch to his storytelling. Writing genuinely funny and (simultaneously) meaningful stuff is hard, and his natural sense of the absurd and ironic is something that is impossible to fake. Gogol had it all.

I was taught that the American contribution to world literature is the short story. But as I've explored the short stories of Russia, I have come to believe that while the Americans may have invented the form, the Russians perfected it. In fact, Russia emerged from the cultural wilderness in the mid-nineteenth century with a firm grasp on both the conciseness and immediacy of the short story and the sprawling, large scale scope of the novel. Russia's literature appears to have arrived mature and fully formed, seemingly all at once, and Gogol's stories were the first flowering of Russia's new literary identity. Had he lived to finish his groundbreaking novel Dead Souls, a partially realized, multi-volume reworking of Dante's The Divine Comedy in his modern day Russia--he would have  even further cemented a reputation as one of his nation's leading creative forces on the cutting edge of a cultural renaissance.

Thus, in describing his work, one is almost reduced to saying things like, "This is so cool!" and "Whoa! This guy could really write!" As it is true with all literary criticism, description underserves the work, and there's no substitute for immersing oneself in his stories. Both the author and the Russia he knew no longer exist, but his stories have a timeless quality to them. Here are some more gems:

The Mantle and Other Stories (18??) by Nikolai Gogol

The funny thing about translated literature is that you'll often find several English titles for the same work. Such is the case here. The title story is actually Gogol's signature work, "The Cloak", a story we've already explored as part of Taras Bulba and Other Tales. You can read about it here. 

Also included in this collection is "The Nose", a surreal masterpiece about a civil servant who has lost his nasal appendage to a careless barber. As the story opens, the barber finds the nose in a loaf of bread served by his wife at the breakfast table. He hastens out the door to throw it off a bridge, relieved to be free of culpability. The nose's owner, a civil servant named Kovaloff, awakens to find a blank space where his nose once was and tries everything he can to track down his nose and return it  to its rightful place. A source of even further humiliation is that his nose has achieved a higher social rank, strutting about in more elaborate clothes and riding in carriages that indicate a superior social position. The police don't take him seriously, and his attempt to place an ad for his lost nose is also unsuccessful.

This is a brilliant story, combining sharp social satire of the lives of civil servants in St. Petersburg with playful, surreal imagery that recalls Terry Gilliam's animated cartoons for Monty Python's Flying Circus. Gogol even addresses the absurdity of the tale with a flash of metafiction in the story's closing pages as he anticipates criticism for such a fantastic tale. This is another Rod Serling-esque story. Excellent stuff.

"Memoirs of a Madman" (often titled "Diary of a Madman" to avoid confusion with Gustave Flaubert's work of the same name, only to face further confusion in 1981 with the release of the identically titled Ozzy Osbourne album), is another of Gogol's great achievements. It is a first person account of one man's descent into insanity that cleverly takes more than a few satirical swipes at Russian society. A titular counselor--the lowest rank of civil servant at the time and one of Gogol's favorite character types--displays a gradual but thorough loss of his hold on reality in his diary. This story is paced perfectly, from his initial inkings of fancy that dogs are able to secretly speak and write letters, to the full blown delusions of grandeur that he is, in fact, a Spanish monarch. All of this is balanced by Gogol's measured prose (in English, of course), which becomes bolder and more outlandish as the piece progresses. Darkly funny, indeed.

The remaining two stories have deep roots in Cossack folk tales with characteristically Gothic touches. "A May Night" is part comedy of errors and part supernatural folktale with a surprisingly intricate plot. This is the story of a love triangle involving Levko, the son of the village headman (a sort of Cossack village leader), his father and a pretty young girl. It also involves a local legend about the death of a young girl whose widower father married a vengeful witch who drove her stepdaughter to suicide by drowning herself in a nearby pond. These two plot elements resolve in a well executed moonlit climax in which young Levko and the ghost of the drowned girl help one another find to satisfaction and revenge. Along the way, we meet many village characters drawn with Gogol's signature wit and perception. This story leaves the reader with a similar sense of satisfaction, being perhaps the best combination of Ukrainian folk lore and wry social comment in the stories we have explored.

"The Viy" is a no-holds-barred horror story, ideal for campfire gatherings and certain to terrorize children and unsettle grownups in a young monastery student, terrorized by a witch when stopping at an old woman's farm for lodging, is inexplicably summoned back to the countryside to perform funeral rights at the specific request of a young girl who has died. "The Viy" has everything--scary supernatural gnome-type creatures, freaky form-shifting witches, dark quasi-religious overtones, and wonderfully detailed characters. This story is scary and entertaining in a very over-the-top way. Fantastic stuff, easily spoiled by my brand of bloggy encapsulation. If you like stories like this, you'll want to read it yourself.

French author Prosper Mérimé, whose novel, Carmen was adapted by Bizet into the famous opera of the same name, provides some dismissive introductory notes that pretty much belittle all the aspects of Gogol's style that I enjoy most. This is the type of preface that can really ruin a reader's experience of a good book and should be heartily ignored or at least postponed until you've read all the stories so you can make up your own mind. To be fair, Mérimé wrote his remarks before Gogol's work could be put into historical context, so we can forgive him a little shortsightedness. But we don't have to be influenced by his opinions prior to reading Gogol's stories. So skip it until you've finished the book.

Download The Mantle and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg

We'll look at some more Russian short stories next time. 

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Russian Short Stories Part 3: Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol 1809-1852

We're foregoing chronology for context again;  we simply can't go any further in our exploration of Russian short stories until we give Nikolai Gogol his due. 

Let's face it; Russian literature isn't exactly packed full of belly laughs. In Dostoyevski's works, there are a few chortles attributable to Gogol's influence. Chekhov displayed a keen wit. In Turgenev, one might find an occasional poignant and restrained chuckle, but always with a heavy sigh. And Tolstoy isn't very funny at all. But Gogol was funny;  his characters are still familiar to us, and his comic timing, vivid imagination and sense of irony blurs the boundaries of genre. This guy was very much of and ahead of his time.

Gogol's work straddles the end of the Romantic age, when Russian literature primarily imitated European forms and styles, and the age in which the tables of influence would begin to turn as Russian realism made its indelible mark on European literature. His stories give us a view of what Russian literature was and of what it would become. The effect of his influence in Russia was almost immediate, and while it would take time for European and American writers to embrace the new perspective, its effect, through the work of Turgenev, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Chekhov, would be long lasting.  

Taken together, these stories are an intriguing patchwork of absurdist humor, satire, fantasy and folklore. Government workers and small town potentates are ridiculed. Paupers make deals with the Devil for riches and marital bliss that don't quite pan out. An impoverished scribe gets a hard-earned brand new coat and the newfound respect of his coworkers, only to have it taken off his back. Menacing figures climb out of spooky portraits to ruin the lives of artists. A bunch of fifteenth century Cossack warriors invade Poland for fun.  Underscoring all of this is a deeply felt humanity and commitment to truths much larger than the ordinary people he depicts. This is rich, colorful stuff indeed.

So let's have a look at the first of two anthologies of his work from the 1830s and 1840s we'll explore on The Overleaf.

Taras Bulba and Other Tales (18??) by Nikolai Gogol

"Taras Bulba" is a novella that is atypical in style. In fact, this novella is the end result of a failed attempt to write the definitive, multi-volume Ukrainian history. It's the story of a Cossack leader and his two sons, Ostap and Andrii, who have just returned from Kiev upon graduating from university. Ostap is a born warrior like his father, and Andrii is sensitive and more prone to romantic feelings. But both sons are expected to fight by their father's side in defense of Cossack glory. After a brief family reunion, Taras takes his sons to join their compatriots.

When not waging war, the Cossacks tended to hang around and party a lot. Restrained by pesky peace treaties and chomping at the bit to cause holy mayhem, they cast their wine gourds aside and pick up their swords to wage war against Poland after hearing news of an alleged Jewish/Polish/Catholic plot that threatens their beloved Orthodox church.  

This historical romance, Homeric in tone and form, is a pretty gripping tale of honor, love, betrayal and adventure. The main hurdle for modern readers will likely be the cringe-inducing anti-Semitism. The Cossacks' short list of folks they love to hate includes Poles, Catholics, Muslims and most vehemently, Jews, who are grotesquely portrayed in shifty and money-grubbing caricature. In all fairness, this bias is very true to life, reflecting a cultural norm in the historical period it depicts and of the nineteenth century. There is a broader context to consider, and while twenty first century hackles might be raised when the Jewish peddler Yankel enters the story, the plot, pacing and finely wrought prose are only somewhat diminished. 

"St. John's Eve" is a classic deal-with-the-Devil story in which a poor young man wins the hand of a beautiful young girl when he accepts sacks of gold from the Devil himself. Not surprisingly, there is a major catch in the deal. This is a Cossack folk tale retold in great romantic style with eerie Gothic touches. Great setup, great ending. It's pretty scary, too.

Gogol's Cossack roots figure prominently in his whole body of work, whether spinning variations of Ukrainian folk tales or describing contemporary urban characters in St. Petersburg or Moscow from an outsider's perspective. "The Cloak" marks where Russian literature really begins. It has been cited by the major Russian writers of the nineteenth century as a singular source of inspiration that set the tone for just about everything that would arise in its wake. 

This is a wicked satire of Russian urban life, where hapless clerks are resigned to a life of meekness and poverty, police and government officials display incredible hubris, and injustice is avenged from the grave. Without spoiling it for you, a miserable government clerk crimps and saves for a new coat for months. His new coat elevates his status in the eyes of his peers, but the sudden loss of the garment brings him face to face with arrogant policemen and obstinate, egotistical bureaucrats. Great ending too, but you didn't hear it from me. The real meat of this story is to be found in the descriptive details.

In "How the Two Ivans Quarreled", two longtime friends, both prominent citizens of a small Ukrainian town take a petty disagreement over the ownership of a Turkish gun to absurd heights. ending in willful destruction of property, endless litigation and the nursing of a grudge that lasts for years. The outcome of the tale is utterly plausible because the characters are so recognizable. What would satire be without a hefty dose of realism? It would be farce--something Gogol never resorts to, no matter how ridiculous the actions of his characters.

My favorite story in this collection is "The Mysterious Portrait", a chilling tale of a down and out artist who visits a shop full of cheap, second and third rate paintings and spends the last of his money on a portrait of an old man that both haunts and fascinates him. On the verge of being evicted from his rooms, the artist has a terrifying dream in which the figure in the painting comes to life bearing packets of gold ducats. When visited by his landlord and a police officer demanding his back rent, he accidentally finds that the picture frame has dispensed to him the money he saw in his dream.

One can imagine what happens next. Enamored of his newfound fortune, he changes his lifestyle, moves into a swank neighborhood and becomes a fashionable artist, moving in exclusive circles and neglecting his considerable talent as an artist to live the good life. The tone, dialogue and moral gravity of the story is not dissimilar to the essential elements of a Rod Serling screenplay for "The Twilight Zone". And that's a good thing.

"The Calabash", local landowners hobnob with offices when the cavalry establishes a new base in a podunk town. One of them, Pythagoras Chertokutsky, well in his cups while playing cards with the boys, brags about his four thousand ruble carriage and invites the party of officers to see it the next day. After more drinking and merriment that keeps him out until four in the morning, he awakens, surprised to find his new, expectant friends have arrived. This story is brief by Gogol's standards--a succinct study of social climbing and braggadoccio with a quick punch line.

By the way, the introduction to this collection is well worth reading. Lots of background information on Gogol, especially relating to the creation of "Taras Bulba".

Download Taras Bulba and Other Tales from Project Gutenberg

Next time, we'll look at another collection of stories by Gogol.

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Russian Short Stories Part 2: Leo Tolstoy in the 1880s

The midlife crisis that seized Tolstoy after the massive popularity of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) led him to disavow his literary successes and pursue a very different course, prompting him to reevaluate how to best use his literary gifts for the benefit of mankind. 

Beginning in the 1880s until the end of his life in 1910, he would write stories and religious and philosophical tracts that sought to express a moral point of view in line with the actual teachings of Christ. The moral standard he espoused rejected adherence to religious and civil authority in favor of individual conscience. He insisted that the actions of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsarist state should be held accountable to the Gospels which they officially endorsed, although their actions frequently contradicted the core of Christ's teachings of social equality, compassion and nonviolence. Publicly calling out Russia's ruling class as a bunch of hypocrites cost him dearly, resulting in his excommunication from the church and raising the ire of the government. By the end of his life, he was hailed as a hero by the people and a reviled as a pariah by those in power. 

Although his priorities and literary voice changed, he was still Tolstoy, a man of incredible gifts and insight. He was an idealist, and however utopian his ideals may seem to us now, his writings from this period had very real, far reaching influence. Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King took him seriously, successfully putting Tolstoy's belief in nonviolence to the test against imperial power and the tyranny of racial segregation. 

These real world successes lend some credence to his convictions. Tolstoy took up the cause of the Russian peasant and oppressed peoples everywhere, pleading for tolerance and understanding. His philosophy was passionate, erratic, sometimes contradictory, but the man's heart was in the right place. His writerly skill. firm conviction and purity of intention can disarm our skeptical impulses and sometimes suspend our disbelief. In the hands of a lesser writer, the fruits of such zeal would be disastrous, but even in service to a philosophical agenda, however flawed, his literary gifts never failed him. Tolstoy's rawness of feeling draws us in.

Both of these collections are short reads, and with one exception, are ideal for lunch hour perusal. They are so deftly and thoroughly written that it's hard to discuss them without spoiling them before you've had the chance to read them, but I've attempted to do so here.

1901 Russian edition of The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories (1889) by Leo Tolstoy

In the very famous title story (actually a novella), Posdnicheff, an aggrieved man on a train, confides in his fellow passenger of how he came to murder his wife--a crime for which he was acquitted. His story is a diatribe that skewers the hypocrisy of gender roles, social rites, the mysterious transformative power of music, declining morals and the state of the institution of marriage. Although many of his points are difficult to argue with, his remedy for these ills is perfect abstinence from some enormously popular and time-honored human pastimes, like drinking, smoking, eating meat and engaging in premarital sex.

"The Kreutzer Sonata" is a cautionary tale about the evils of unrestrained sensuality, the double standards imposed on men and women regarding morality, and the perils of living a life not in accordance with Christian spiritual and moral principles, but the message I took away from this story is that it's best to exercise caution when engaging a fellow train traveler in conversation because he might just turn out to be a crazy person.

But from the opening dialog between various passengers about the changing social status of women, men and marriage to the final, violent crescendo of his wife's murder, "The Kreutzer Sonata" is masterfully written. In Posdnicheff's confession, Tolstoy maintains a focused, maniacal intensity that never lets up. In fact, you might have to take a break after reading this one.

"Ivan the Fool" is a fairy tale that paints a picture of a Christian anarchic utopia in which those who toil for money and power are brought to ruin and those who work for the betterment of themselves and their neighbors live happy lives. Well wrought, but as with many fairy tales (and like all propaganda), one gets the feeling that the message is laid on a bit thick. ."A Missed Opportunity" is based on the parable of the unforgiving servant from the Gospel of Matthew. Both are beautifully crafted and both offer points of view that, like most utopian philosophies, are tinged with truths that are easy to grasp and equally difficult to practice. 

"A Lost Opportunity" is a tale in simple language about two peasant farming families who once lived in harmony, sharing resources and helping each other. But relations between the two families rapidly break down when a squabble about a chicken laying an egg in the neighbor's yard escalates to a dizzying height of pettiness, litigation, destruction and violence that extends to the surrounding village. All of this could have been avoided by a simple act of forgiveness. A point well taken in any age. 

"Polikushka" dates from 1863 and while the straightforward style fits in with the other stories in this collection, its fatalism is a little out of place. It is a tale of redemption thwarted by circumstance when a servant with a reputation for thieving is summoned by his noblewoman for an errand to collect a large sum of money and return it to her. Determined to prove himself trustworthy, he sets out to fulfill his duty. Therein lies the spoiler. We will tiptoe past it now...

The final piece, "The Candle", depicts the era of brutality and degradation of Russia's serfs as the setting for a simple story about good triumphing over evil. But there is a healthy dose of irony and darkly tinged humor here, elevating this piece above the deceptively simple morality tale it pretends to be. That's all you get, else the stories are in danger of being spoiled. I suggest you read the last two stories back to back to see how his style and perspective had changed in twenty years.  

Download The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg

Post-midlife-crisis-era Leo Tolstoy

What Men Live By and Other Tales (1885) by Leo Tolstoy

Of these two collections, this one is the most overtly religious in tone. All of the stories are good, all are parables, and the last of the stories is a knockout masterpiece. These stories were written to be understood by people from peasants to kings, and their beauty and potency is in their simplicity. 

"What Men Live By" is the story of a shoemaker named Simon who encounters a man named Michael who is naked, cold and hungry, while on an errand to collect money owed for his services and buy himself a sheepskin coat. In an act of Christian charity, he takes the man home to his wife, feeds and clothes him and takes him on as an apprentice. There are several hints that reveal to us that Michael is not of this world, and not surprisingly, he turns out to be an angel send back to Earth by God to learn a lesson for his disobeyance while going about the business of collecting a soul. At the end, it is revealed that the lessons he learns are what dwells in man, what is not given to man and what men live by. Enough said.

"Three Questions" contains a message that pretty much anyone of any time, age or culture can understand. A king summons all who would advise him to ponder three questions. The story begins:

"It once occurred to a certain king, that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid; and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would never fail in anything he might undertake."

Yeah? No kidding! Who among my readers wouldn't like to know the answer to these questions? Not surprisingly, everyone he consults has differing answers to his queries, so the king ventures out to seek the advice of a reclusive wise man. Long story short with no spoilers: He finds out, and the answers he gets are good ones.

In "The Coffee-House of Surat" we find a banished Persian theologian whose considerable scholarly efforts have only led him to question the existence of God. After drinking a cup of opium, he openly asks his African slave if he believes in God. This exchange is heard by the establishment's diverse coterie of foreign travelers, leading to a discussion that reveals many different viewpoints on the subject. This story is a concise, eloquent plea for tolerance. Nicely written with an easily digestible message.

Which brings us to "How Much Land Does One Man Need?", a perfectly drawn tale that I can't tell you too much about without spoiling the experience of reading it. James Joyce thought that this story is one of the greatest in all of literature and I thoroughly agree with him. A farmer and landowner, tempted by the Devil into pride and greed, seeks to acquire more land to improve his family's stature and standard of living. But how much is enough and to what lengths will he go to get it? Sorry…you'll have to read this one for yourself. because I'm not going to give it away. What an ending!  But don't take my word for it. click on the link below and enjoy it.

Download What Men Live By and Other Tales from Project Gutenberg

Next time, we'll look at stories by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, the father of Russian literature in the 19th century.

If you'd like to know more about Tolstoy, here is an excellent documentary film from the BBC. It's really fabulous and I can't recommend it enough. In fact, this film provided much of the biographical detail I've included in these posts.

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