George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

George Saunders' new book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, analyzes several Russian short stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Gogol.  As a Russophile, I was happy to read or reread the stories he selected, which included The Nose, The Master and the Man, The Cart, and at least one story from A Sportsman's Sketches, and other nineteenth century classics.  On the other hand, I was just slightly disappointed that Saunders didn't have any special expertise in either Russian literature or history.  Picking up the book felt like a case of false advertising.  Yes, Saunders had taught a course in the Russian short story for several decades and knew these stories intimately.  However, he was primarily concerned with the craftsmanship of the stories, rather than their Russian themes or the Russian literary contexts from which they emerged. Indeed, Saunders analyzed these short stories primarily from the point of view of a writer, or would-be writer.  In some ways, Saunders could have written the same sort of book about any group of short stories.  He really did not need to limit himself to Russian stories, so the book seemed a bit gimmicky.  In any case, Sanders did something new by asking readers to read these stories, and then carefully deconstruct them in terms of their plot and other literary devices.  And certainly it was nice to approach these classics from the point of view of a writer learning a craft.  It was somewhat exciting to be asked by Saunders to think about the many choices each of these Russian authors made when creating their masterpieces.  It was also interesting to see that Saunders thinks that a writer like Turgenev may have actually created something unique as result of his own creative limitations.  That is to say, Saunders argues that Turgenev was not an expert at plot, but therefore turned characterization and setting and detail into something extraordinarily beautiful.  

The Master and Margarita

As a Russophile, I'm embarrassed that I've not read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita until now.  Although I recognize that countless Russians believe that this book is the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century, I never seemed to get very far with this book until now.  In fact, I only managed to finish the book by "reading" it on Hoopla, and unfortunately audio-books can be difficult to follow even with much simpler plot structures.  Notwithstanding the book's imposing reputation, or perhaps because of that imposing reputation, my impression of the book wasn't very positive.  I recognize that Bulgakov was one of the Soviet Union's most competent modernists.  I recognize that the imaginative elements of the book, including its rich cast of bizarre characters, deserve my appreciation.  I also recognize that Bulkagov deserves praise for producing such a creative work in the midst of Stalinist oppression.  However, Bulgakov's masterwork was a little too chaotic for my taste.

Someday I hope to re-read the book.  Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, assigned to me in my first Russian history class at Georgetown University, was probably one of the first Russian books I ever read.  Like Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog comes across as an absurdist fairy tale, a modernist version of Gogol's strange tales of walking noses and the like.  But Heart of a Dog's shortness seems to make its strange conceits more believable.  Master and Margarita's endless flights of fancy seem to lead nowhere and to distract the reader from any sustained sense of direction or purpose to the plot.  I recognize that this is a relatively shallow reading of a novel that no doubt contains complexity and richness.  I certainly can understand that the book is representative of a type of modernist prose that has been immensely influential in the last fifty or so years.  In fact, it did remind me another book of modernist fiction I liked much better:  Ralph Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, which contains similar absurdist conceits but somehow seems to hang together as a unified tale of one man's intellectual and political journey through an absurdly racist America.  Perhaps the reason I prefer Invisible Man to Master and Margarita is because Ellison was able to tackle racism much more directly than Bulgakov was able to tack Stalinism.  In both cases, the author was courageously responding to a culture of systematic violence.  However, in the American case, Ellison could at least count on a black and liberal white audience to celebrate his rather overt depiction of American racist tropes.  In the Russian case, Bulgakov might have felt that even if he were "writing for the desk" he could not risk any direct reference to the terror that was overwhelming his countrymen.  Better perhaps to see Stalinism in the biblical allegory.

The Master and Margarita was clearly ahead of its time, and influential after it was finally published.  Yet when laid side by side with a Russian masterwork of the nineteenth century, it seemed lacking to me.  The author's inventiveness lacked purpose to my mind.  I do hope to learn more about the work, reread it, and post on this book again.  I also hope to hear from readers who are interested in explaining their enthusiasm for the book.  I will fully confess that my audio "reading" of this book distracted me from the plot.  I only post this incomplete analysis here to remind myself to return to book in the future with an open mind and enough time to read the book in print.

Mission to Moscow (and also Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, and Saint-Petersburg)

On Saturday morning, I'll be travelling to Russia for the second time in my life.  I'll be making short visits to Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, and Saint-Petersburg.  In the space of two weeks, my small Fulbright delegation of community college administrators will visit Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kalinigrad State Technical University, State Polytechnical University, Smolny College (The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences), the University of Information Technologies (Mechanics and Optics), Northern (Arctic) Federal University, and Krasnogorsk State College.  We'll also the American Center and the American embassy in Moscow.  Over the past eight years, I've gradually become obssessed with Russia, but I'm always reminded of the Don DeLillo novel, White Noise, in which a professor invents a brand new academic field of inquiry, Hitler Studies, only to become increasingly embarrassed by the fact that he knows no German whatsoever. On my second visit to Russia, I'm acutely aware that it's time to learn Russian.  Like DeLillo's character in White Noise, the academic conference is about to begin, I'm headed for ever greater levels of humiliation if I don't find myself a Russian language course or immersion experience in the very near future.

As I prepare for my Mission to Moscow, I reflect on my professional life.  Shouldn't everybody have a chance to go abroad for professional development?  I think so, and to this end I secured permission for my college to join a consortium of international programs.  This consortium will allow my college to send a faculty member and a staff member to Holland, Finland, or China, each and every year.  More than that, the consortium will allow my college to host international vistors from each of these countries.  I'm also excited by the consortium's student exchange programs.  Over time, my hope is to send many of my college's unprivileged students overseas to add a truly global dimension to their programs of study.

Leaving for Russia also comes in the context of my newly formed Russian literature book club.  This club takes place in the context of a youth services facility for at risk high school students.  This week, I showed a few slides about Russia, and we read the first half of Gogol's famous work, The Greatcoat (i.e., The Overcoat).    On my first recent reading of this book, I was struck by how Gogol ridiculed Akaky Akakiyevich as a penny-pinching, pendantic clerk whose only joy in life seemed to be copying what other people had written.  Gogol seemed to be critiquing everything about the poor soul, including his asceticism, materialism, penury, slavishness, and sexless life.  If Akaky Akakiyevich was consumed with the ideal of possessing a new coat, how small was his inner life?  Shouldn't everybody, nobody how poor, be interested in something beyond a new coat?

On a second reading of the short story, I started to see the other side of Akaky Akakiyevich.  Perhaps my move from Robert Chandler's translation to Christopher English's translation of the story helped me to gain this new perspective.  Certainly Richard Peace's introduction to Gogol's Plays and Peterburg Tales made a difference.  For Peace argues that Akaky Akakiyevich couldn't have been as poor as his is made out to be.  After all, he wasn't unemployed, didn't spend money unnecessarily, and he had absolutely no family to support.  So perhaps A.A.'s lifestyle was a choice.  Perhaps he actually enjoyed his spartan life.  At the very least, we can say that the hero of The Greatcoat had a Zen-like ability to take pleasure in life as it is.  If one is a copyist, shouldn't one throw oneself in the work?  If he wasn't a Zen Buddhist, perhaps his abstemious lifestyle had elements of the Christian martyr.  Although St. Petersburg was clearly a status-obssessed, bureaucratic world of rank and privilege, Akaky Akakiyevich lived a humble life of service toward others, free from any hint of sensuality.  His life was a life of service, and included regular bouts of mockery from those who immersed themselves in St. Petersburg usual routines.

At any rate, the students haven't finished the story yet.  We're waiting for the ghost to show up to spice up the story.  In the meantime, they seemed interested in my trip to Russia.  None of them has had the chance to travel overseas, and few of them seem interested in venturing abroad.  They asked me whether I thought I'd be kidnapped overseas, or why I even wanted to go anywhere else.  Surprisingly, I was grateful for the chance to talk about some of the prejudices Americans regularly encounter when deadling with other societies.  I also had the chance to discuss some basics concepts of international law and diplomacy.  Upon my return, I'll show the students pictures of my visit and hopefully get them interested in learning more about Russia, or about any foreign people.

Some snippets from Gogo's The Greatcoat:

"As for his rank (and with us rank is the first thing that has to be declared), he was of the genus eternal Titular Councillor..."

"The boy was duly christened, and in the process he started crying and pulled an awful face as if he were having premonitions that one day he might become a titular councillor."

"The young officials would mock him and make fun at his expense to the limits of their clerkish wit..."

"...for no Russian, regardless of his condition, can ever renounce high society.."

[He] "had been hitting the bottle, the one-eyed devil."

"Thus the whole of Holy Russia is polluted by imitation--everyone copies and apes his superior."

"And Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakiyevich, just if he had never been there at all."

"Dead and gone was a being whom no one, not even a naturalist always ready to mount even an ordinary fly on a pin and examine it under a microscope, had ever shown an interest;  a being who had patiently endured the mockery of his office colleagues and who had gone to his grave without excessive fuss..."

House Hunting with Gogol (or, How I Lost My Mother)

Although I am officially on hiatus, I continue to read Russian history and literature, however fitfully. So I'll post now, just to keep in practice. Currently, I'm reading Henri Troyat's wonderful biography of Nikolai Gogol. Like all of Troyat's biographies (and I've previously commented on his books about Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turganev, Alexander I, Catherine the Great, and Pushkin), this one balances a healthy regard for the author's literary genius with an equally healthy regard for the more absurdly comic aspects of his author's unusual life. I'm also reading Norman Mailer's biographical work about Lee Harvey Oswald, who spent some of his formative years in Communist Russia.

But to return to the subject of hiatus, I'm wondering why Oswald and Gogol aren't inspiring me to write as they would have one year previously. I'm wondering whether the problem is that I'm too bored to write, or, conversely, too preoccupied with an increasingly active life to spend time on this blog. It's strange to be unsure if one's life is too empty or too full at a specific moment in time. At any rate, my life hasn't been uneventful in the past few months. I got engaged, for instance, just one week ago, to a wonderful woman. Without her, as Victor Shklovsky said, the sea has no color. This, of course, has led me to reflect on all sorts of things, including love. But one of the most emotionally destabilizing things I've done recently is to tour homes with the intent to buy one with my bride-to-be. 

First, of course, is the question of location. Where does one live? Should one live cheaply or well? Should one look for low taxes or high aesthetic quality? And even if one decides in favor of the beautiful, does one look for a beautiful home or a beautiful neighborhood? Looking for a house is an almost overwhelming experience, since it's one of the few times in life one is often forced to think in terms of one's entire lifetime. When looking for a home, we're not just asking whether or not he'd like to live somewhere in the coming year, we're asking if we'd mind (potentially at at least) living and dying in a particular spot. And like Steven King's book, The Shining, we find traces of other people's life decisions everywhere we go.

In one home I recently visited, the seller's hopes and dreams were overpowering. This was, perhaps, largely because he insisted on showing us the home himself. Having lived in the place for many, many decades, he seemed to be asking us to take up a life journey he could no longer pursue. The fact that the home was hopelessly outdated, a mixed up jumble of luxuriously ugly features, didn't help matters. There was a pool, a bar, reflecting pools, Japanese decorations, and a hundred other reminders of 1960s splendor. The whole place reminded one of how proud Mr. Brady must have been of his Brady Bunch ranch palace. The seller's description--a taste of the Hollywood Hills in suburban Chicago--just about fit the bill. This place spoke to the suburban glory of the 1960s, before the suburbs had lost their charm. And the seller, a doctor with a tightly clad Playboy Bunny wife about forty years past her prime, still saw this wreck of a house, whose yard was (not ironically) made up of AstroTurf, as something Bob Hope or a member of the Rat Pack might well covet. Pondering the place, I wondered what the right response is? Does the home need to be loved? Would it be the death or birth of my own dreams? Would I sell some space-aged, middle aged man this place forty years hence?

House hunting is an emotional process by any reckoning, so readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that my search inevitably led to the very source of my emotional volatility:  my mother.  Like Gogol, my mother's presence looms large in my life.  For Gogol, who lost his father at an early age but was doted upon by a mother who believed her odd son could do no wrong, his mother was never far from his mind.  Long before he had any right to believe he might befriend Pushkin and make an enormous mark on the literary world with Dead Souls, The Inspector General, The Nose, Diary of a Madman, and The Overcoat, Gogol's mother told anyone who listened that her strange and awkward son was a genius and demigod.  Gogol, who had only sisters, was doted upon by his mother, and never doubted her messianic interpretation of his life's mission:  to conquer the world, one way or the other.

I encountered my own mother in the process of home hunting, and encountered her on multiple occasions.  With apologies to the writers of one of my favorite television shows, my experience in home buying might, thus far, deserve the title:  How I Lost My Mother.  The fact that my mom died decades ago didn't lesson the impact of her several appearances on Redfin and ReMax tours.  At the outset of our search for a matrimonial home, my fiancee and I looked at small homes in Hinsdale, Illinois.  The location, astride two convenient highways and right next door to my place of employment, and surrounded by wonderful schools, seemed too good to ignore.  Additionally, it had the advantage of being someplace other than the suburb in which I grew up.  Who wants to repeat the past so precisely by moving into the very suburb one grew up?

One of our favorite homes in Hinsdale turned out to be directly across the street from the hospital where I was born.  Surely buying the house would have been something more than a metaphorical return to the womb?  Of course, as Gogol taught us, life is a strange mixture of comedy and tragedy, and so I soon recalled that this hospital was also the scene of my mother's chemotherapy.  Recalling childhood trips with my mother to that dreaded site of cancer treatment, I found myself driving once more over the small, fragile bridge right outside the hospital that I once knew so well.  The rickety bridge was, once upon a time, a special joy for a little kid:  in the middle of a ordinary suburb, this awkward, single-lane bridge over the train tracks seemed to belong to a much more remote time and place.  The bridge was fun, but sentimentally tied to locus of death and dying in my child's imagination:  the Hinsdale hospital.

Looking in LaGrange, my fiancee and I found another wonderful house, but this time the home turned out to be two doors down from my first home, which had long since been torn down.  How strange to be pondering the purchase of something so proximate to one's original shelter?  The home, located right along the train tracks and right next to my high school, had an enormous backyard, but the noise of the passing trains was almost unbearable.  It was so loud there that I wondered how my mom and dad dealt with the noise themselves over forty years ago.

My mother has appeared to me in dreams these past few weeks as well.  When she died, she visited me regularly for the first several years.  I'd dream that her cancer had turned out to be less severe than originally diagnosed.  Everything had been a mistake:  Mom had somehow survived, and life could continue on its normal trajectory.  The dreams themselves were delicious:  I was safe and sound, for Mom had never left the stage of my life.  Waking from these dreams was another matter.  How many times does the average survivor re-experience the death of a loved one in the waking hours of morning?  Probably hundreds of times.

Last week, I dreamed that I was looking for a home and found a really perfect one in LaGrange Park.  The home only had one regular bathroom, but there was a crude, unfinished half-bathroom in the basement that would make things work.  In a pinch, the kids could use that one.  The three bedrooms were large, the closet space was excellent, and there was a large yard and garden.  The house wasn't anything special, but it was very livable.  With a porch, living room, separate dining room, and expanded kitchen (not pretty, but large), what more did one need?  The school was reasonably good too, only a short walk for the kids.

Imagining my current family in that home felt wonderful, but it soon occurred to me that this was the very same house in which I grew up.  As such, it was also the last home I shared with my mother.  I moved only a year or so after her death.  And of course I realize now that by moving I not only left my childhood behind, I left my mother, whose spirit even now probably lingers in that place, a place of mingled joy and sadness.  If one hasn't been traumatized by loss one might not understand how a place, or a person, can be haunted.  But Gogol would have understood me.  Accustomed to writing about Ukrainian spirits and Romantic encounters with St. Petersburg phantasmagoria, even without the benefit of Freud, Gogol's Gothic imagination would have allowed him to appreciate the irrational and supernatural dimensions of even an ordinary house hunt.  (And no, it has no escaped me that today is Mother's Day).

Gogol's Magic Chaos

"So what is the incomprehensible secret force driving me towards you? Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from sea to sea throughout your entire expanse? Tell me the secret of your song. What is this, calling and sobbing and plucking at my heart? What are these sounds that are like a stab and a kiss, why do they come rushing into my soul and fluttering about my heart? Rus! Tell me what do you want of me! What is this strange bond secretly uniting us?"

"What does this limitless space portend? And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?"

"And pray, find me the Russian who does not care for fast driving? Inclined as he is to let himself go, to whirl his life away and send it to the devil, his soul cannot love speed."

"Rus, are you not similar in your headlong motion to one of those nimble troikas that none can overtake?"

"Is that my home looming blue in the distance? Is that my mother sitting there at her window? Mother dear, save your poor son! Shed a tear upon his aching head. See how they torture him. Press your poor orphan to your heart. There is no place for him in the whole wide world! He is a hunted creature. Mother dear, take pity on your sick little child...And by the way, gentlemen, do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a round lump growing right under his nose?

Once upon a time I worked in an adult undergraduate degree completion program, With limited space, I shared an office with a fellow English instructor. Our small office also served as a repository for homework assignments and final exams. One science faculty member regularly asked students to turn in a poster-sized description of an ecosystem. The assignment seemed a little juvenile, but almost all of the students turned in carefully crafted visual representations of complex natural worlds, whether they were bogs, forests, prairies, or everglades. Generally speaking, the posters contained about 30 or so separate ecological units or natural entities. We marveled at the type-A personalities who had labored over so many hours to create such beautiful and accurate descriptions of life on planet earth.

And yet, all science students are not created alike. Inevitably, one student's assignment fell far below the standard of the class as a whole, a testament to human inequality and the science of statistics. One such retrograde assignment caught our eye. Where all other students had drawn and labelled dozens of flora, fauna, and biological processes, one student was pleased to turn in a poster-sized picture of a crudely drawn and utterly solitary turtle. Beyond a round circle meant to symbolize a puddle, and a short stick, the turtle sat alone, like some kind of prison tattoo or cosmic Hindu presence. To my mind, the turtle represented failure, but not just any failure. Here was the visual proof that one student had failed to live up to what would surely be the professor's normal academic expectations. Of course, expectations are predicated on context. If the professor had received thirty simplistic "turtle" drawings, perhaps he or she would have accepted this one as "C" or even "B" work. But this hadn't been the case: the turtle stood out as a spectacular example of low performance.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the student's putative ecosystem, the turtle. Did the student who had drawn know she had produced such crap, or did he or she imagine that most of the other students were either incapable of, or unwilling to, create something better? It was hard to say. But anybody who has ever watched American Idol knows how often people live in denial about their competitiveness. Indeed, many American Idol contestants scarcely know they lack an iota of talent even when the celebrity judges are bluntly telling them they are horrendous singers.

The pathetic moment is often captured with plaintive statesments like this one: "I know I am good... At least I think I am....My mother says I could be a star..." Perhaps the man who created the turtle still didn't know he wasn't academically competitive. Maybe the teacher gave him an inflated grade; maybe he thinks that all other students failed the assignment too. More troubling than the student's naivitee, is the recognition of my own. How many "turtle" assignments had I turned in in the course of a lifetime? It's one thing to embrace defeat, but quite another to turn in an assignment or performance without any sense of whether the result will be mocked by those who are charged with evaluating it.

Every time we create we risk churning out a turtle. The trick is ignoring the possibility of failure. Nikolai Gogol turned in few literary turtes in his creative lifetime, though his admirer Vladimir Nobokov isn't shy about denigrating almost everything he wrote except for his masterpieces, Dead Souls, Part I, The Inspecter General, and the Overcoat. Nabokov admires Gogol's creativity, absurdity, and prose, but thinks his talent developed late and ended rather early. Nabokov celebrates neither Gogol's famous St. Petersburg Tales--he thinks them trite--nor his polemical writings, which include surviving fragments of Part II ad Part III of Dead Souls. However, Nabokov's praise for Gogol's masterpieces is unbounded.

As a master stylist himself, his belief that Gogol had created richly complex, almost superhumanly inventive verbal worlds is high praise indeed. "Pushkin wrote in three-dimensional prose," Nabokov wrote, "but Gogol wrote in four-dimensional prose, at least." He meant that Gogol isn't merely funny or clever. He is also not merely a good writer. He's one of the father's of Russian prose, as profound as Russian life, or much more so. He doesn't merely capture the essence of life, he exceeds it, elaborates upon it. Gogol hasn't written literature, he has created "magic chaos," captured rare moments of "irrational perception," and delineated the literary equivalent of the curverature of the space-time continuum. Nabokov writes that the Overcoat, for instances, shows that "parallel lines not only may meet, but they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled..."