Since I am about to take a continuing education course on Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays, I thought I would get a copy of George Saunder's recent book "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" and see what he had to say about three of them.
Saunders, an award-winning American author, is also a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University where he has taught a course on Russian short stories, in translation, for about 20 years. "A Swim in a Pond ... " is essentially a collection of seven of his workshop sessions and it begins with Chekhov's "In the Cart," published in 1897, one of seven stories that Saunders says are clear, simple and moving, but also meant to challenge, antagonize and outrage -- "and in a complicated way, to console."
He also says that while the stories are for the most part "quiet, domestic and apolitical," they are also resistance literature written at a time when writers could face censorship, or even exile, imprisonment and execution, for anything considered transgressively political.
In general, the key to success in story writing, Saunders says, is an emotionally moving tale that a reader feels compelled to finish.
While at one point Saunders says he considers terms such as "theme," "plot," "character development" and "structure" not very useful, as he takes readers page by page through "In the Cart," character development is what he mostly talks about.
We initially encounter the chief protagonist of the story, a woman named Marya Vasilyevna, and discover that she is "unhappy because of the monotony of her life" -- and as a result, "the story has become restless." So says Saunders.
Eleven pages later, after various interactions with her cart driver, with a wealthy, but useless local landowner and with some peasants in a tea-shop, things are going downhill. But a momentary vision of a woman on a passing train reminds Marya of her mother and her much better life as a child, leaving her at least momentarily elated.
The result of all this, says Saunders, is that readers have been taken through the depths of Marya's loneliness to the point where one feels her loneliness as if it is one's own.
"Over the course of these eleven pages, the blank mind with which you began has been filled with a new friend, Marya, who, if my experience is any indication, will stay with you forever," the professor says. End of the workshop.
In other words, this story is an example of successful character development. The bottom line for Saunders is that Marya, as an individual person, is timeless.
While I can't take issue with anything Saunders has to say, I came away with a completely different reading of what the story was all about. To me, Marya is of no great importance, or particularly memorable as an individual. Rather, her life helps to elucidate the state of Russia at a particular time.
"In a Cart" (that title pretty much says it all) takes place about eight years before the tumultuous if ultimately unsuccessful Russian Revolution of 1905 and the country, other than wealthy cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, is gradually falling to pieces. The cart in which Marya, a schoolmistress, is riding and the terrible roads over which it is traveling exemplify the state of most of the country. The express train that temporarily halts the cart and the sophisticated woman she notices riding on it speak of profound income and opportunity inequalities. A few Russians can ride such trains; most of the rest are stuck in carts -- and stuck in other ways, too.
As the cart bumps along on a damp day in early Spring, some snow still on the ground, readers learn:
-- Marya, originally from a middle-class Moscow family, "could imagine no other future than the school, the road to town and back, and again the school and again the road." [Russia is a country without upward mobility.]
--The mayor of Moscow has just been killed. [An actual event at the time of the story.]
--The wealthy landowner in his four-horse carriage who encounters the cart drinks heavily and when servicing as an examiner of students at the school, gives nothing but the highest grades because he knows nothing. He could easily have improved the roads, but doesn't. He gives the school globes, which Marya considers of no need. [These students aren't going anywhere.]
Saunders makes much of Marya's thoughts about the wealthy landowner as being handsome despite all his flaws and perhaps a way out of her situation -- and how that helps readers understand her. My sense is that Chekhov added this to the story to help disguise its true nature: a critique of the state of Russian society and thus of the country's rulers. The Marya-landowner relationship, or potential relationship, turns out to be just a bit of wheel spinning by Chekhov. Nothing comes of it -- but it helps cloak the underlying nature of the tale.
--Marya wants to get the school janitor, who does nothing but cuff the boys, discharged, "but no one paid any attention to her." The person with such authority can rarely be found and when he is, claims to have no time for whatever needs to be addressed. An inspector has only visited the school once in three years and has no understanding of anything connected with it -- and got his job not because he was qualified, but because of who he knew. The School Board rarely met and no one knew where. Someone with the title of Trustee of the school is half-illiterate, stupid and a friend of the janitor. [So much for the education of rural Russian children.]
--"Marya continues to think of the school and its corrupt administration, and the fact there is no one for her to turn to."
At one point, Sauders talks about how Chekhov keeps describing the road the cart is traveling as getting worse and worse, indicating "a steady degrading situation." That, in my view, is an allegory for the state of Russia in general at the time of the story.
--Marya had begun to teach school from necessity (her parents died when she was young) and she has little interest in the students themselves -- just getting them past the examinations. "What kind of Russia is this that compels a person to work a job to which she has no calling, and so be reduced by it?" Saunders asks in his commentary. My view: that is exactly what this story is all about; not Marya the individual woman, but Marya the representative of the state of Russia.
-- "Teachers, impecunious physicians, doctor's assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of firewood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyena can bear it for long; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work." [With that passage, Chekhov interrupts his narrative for the sake of more critical social commentary. Russia is in such bad shape its best people simply give up.]
--The cart driver claims that when a local school was being built, graft was rampant. Marya tries to dismiss it as nonsense, but Chekhov says no one believed her and thought she was both paid too much and guilty of graft herself. [This is a society where those on the bottom trust no one higher up the social ladder.]
Well that's pretty much it. For me, Chekhov may well have painted a compelling picture of a lonely woman deserving our sympathy -- "an emotionally moving tale," as Saunders put it -- but only to serve a greater purpose: a scathing critique of the prevailing state of Russia at the arrival of the 20th century. Marya, like the cart, is a vehicle upon which the critique rides.
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