From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov and Other Stories

by Vsevolod Garshin

Garshin (1855-88) was the outstanding new writer in Russia between Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. This provides the most substantial selection of his stories ever available in English. Garshin gives voice to the unease of an era that knew the horrors of modern war, and the squalors of rapid industrialization.

This selection, the most substantial in English for three-quarters of a century, contains the best of Garshin’s fiction – sixteen stories, almost all the published work completed in a tragically short life. The epic title story on the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78; The Red Flower, Carshin’s haunting masterpiece set in a lunatic asylum; the compact war story Four Days which pioneers stream-of-consciousness technique; masterly and moving stories such as Artists and Orderly and Officer; the semiotic tour de force The Signal; the reworked legend Haggai the Proud, here translated into English for the first time; a handful of fables, including the allegory on the revolutionary movement Attalea princeps – the thematic and stylistic variety is impressive.

Genres: Short Stories, Russia, Fiction, Russian Literature, Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Vsevolod Garshin (Russian: Всеволод Михайлович Гаршин) is considered one of Russia's masters of short fiction. The son of a wealthy army officer, he served in the last of the Russo-Turkish Wars (1877 to 1878) and wrote his first story, "Four Days" (1877), while recovering from battle wounds. His subsequent stories, which were praised by Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov, often dealt with the subject of evil. Garshin suffered from recurring bouts of mental illness and his masterpiece, "The Scarlet Flower" (1883), was based on his confinement in an asylum. He committed suicide at 33. His collected works were translated into English as The Signal and Other Stories (1912).

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov is a brilliant collection of pessimistic and graphic stories. They are picturesque, memorable and every single one of them deserves a special attention.
Four Days is about horrors of war and dire suffering of a wounded soldier…

He was a huge fat Turk, yet I ran straight at him, weak and skinny as I am. Something banged, something flew past me, it seemed enormous; a ringing started in my ears. ‘That was him shooting me,’ I thought. But with a scream of terror he pressed back against a thick hawthorn bush. He could have gone round that bush, but terrified and uncomprehending, he crawled into its thorny branches. I struck out and knocked his rifle out of his hand, then struck again and rammed my bayonet into something. There was a sound somewhere between a growl and a moan. I ran on.

An Incident is a confession of a young whore and a gloomy tale of the fatal love…

‘What for?’ I went on, getting heated. ‘What possible interest can you have in me? No. you’d better not come here: I will not strike up an acquaintance with you, because I have no acquaintances. I know why you came here! Your curiosity was roused by that policeman’s story. You thought, “Now here’s a rarity – an educated girl come to such a life…” You’ve got a mind to save me? Get away from me – there’s nothing I need! Better leave me to breathe my last alone rather than…’

Stories of fears, swindling, creativity, parables of fatality and ambitions…
The main character of A Night contemplates a suicide and recollects his entire futile life…

…All my life, with its seeming variety – its sorrows, joys, despairs, raptures, hatreds and loves – has passed to the time of its ticking. And only now, tonight, when everything in this huge town and this huge house is asleep and there isn’t a sound but the beating of my heart and the ticking of the watch – only now do I see that all these adversities, joys and raptures were nothing but hollow spectres.

From the reminiscences of Private Ivanov is a tale of a long and excruciating, full of hardships march to the final battle…

It was a cold, overcast morning, with a slight drizzle; the trees in the cemetery were showing through the mist, and the tops of the tombstones peered out from behind the dank cemetery gate and wall. We skirted round the cemetery, passing it on our right. And I fancied that it was gazing at us through the mist uncomprehendingly. ‘Why do you, thousands of you, march for thousands of miles to die on foreign fields, when you can die here, die in peace and lie down beneath my wooden crosses and stone slabs? Stay here!’

The Red Flower is a murky tale of the lethal madness…

At last four of them brought him down, seized hold of his arms and legs, and lowered him into the warm water. To him it was boiling, and in his deranged mind flickered the disjointed, fragmentary thought that this was an ordeal by boiling water and red-hot iron. Choking in the water, convulsively thrashing his arms and legs, which were still in the warders’ firm grasp, and gasping for breath, he screeched out a disjointed tirade unimaginable to anyone who had not actually heard it. It was a jumble of prayers and maledictions. He shouted until his strength was gone and finally, with scalding tears in his eyes, he made a quiet announcement that was wholly at odds with the harangue that had gone before.
‘Saint George, thou holy martyr, into thy hands I commend my body. But my spirit – no, oh no!’

Destiny of any ordinary man can be most complicated and full of surprises.

[Jan-Maat]

Long ago when the world was young, if not quite in the Age of Gold, then at least the Silver Age I had come to that stage in a student's life when they gaze out as though over the wide Pacific Ocean and know that the time has come to roll up their sleeves, wind a sheet of paper into the typewriter and clack out with maybe as many as four and a half fingers the beginnings of a dissertation.

When it came down to it I was seduced by the bright lights and big themes of The Brothers Karamazov. An unwise choice, but already I was dunderheaded and disinclined to follow even my own advice. The alternative for a while was the stories of Vsevolod Garshin.

The problem that Garshin has, is that hardly anybody has heard of him. Indeed I couldn't yet dare to be so bold as to recommend that anybody without access to a library with the very deepest vaults should even read him, since he's rarely in print.

Which is a pity.

He had a short nineteenth-century life that ended in suicide, which he had spent writing short stories many of which had grim endings. But those stories are rich, occasionally strange and inventive in technique.

In The Signal a railway worker sees that the railway track has been sabotaged. Knowing that a train is coming he realises that he has to signal to it to stop. Unlike The Railway Children he doesn't have a red petticoat, unfortunately he only has a white shirt which he turns into a reddish flag with his own blood and let this be a warning to everyone to always have a red flannel petticoat on them in case of emergencies.

Another similarly grim though subtler story is Attalea Princeps which is written from the point of view of a Brazilian tree growing under glass in a Russian Botanical Garden. The tree strives towards the distant sunlight, grows to the top of the greenhouse, grows until it cracks the glass. The glass is repaired but still the tree yearns, as is its nature, towards the distant sunlight, with over time the inevitable result.

From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov and Four Days, are both drawn from Garshin's experience as a volunteer in the 1877 Russo-Turkish War (an event which is in the background of Anna Karenina and something that Dostoyevsky was very excited about in Diary of a Writer) are early, I believe, examples of stream of consciousness writing. Four Days is particularly striking - it follows a soldier lying wounded on a battlefield for the titular four days as he moves in and out of consciousness. Reminiscences of Private Ivanov is a continuous rush of anticipation, the stream of consciousness style in lockstep with the flowing march of the soldiers southwards towards the enemy.

His stories (in particular A Red Flower) have a psychological intensity that lingers in my memory close to twenty years after reading them and as far as I recall from the crabbed penned marginalia that generously came with the copy I read generous splashes of Manichaeism manifest in the form of an evil threatening toad which menaces the titular red flower.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book by the great short-story Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin! The book contains many of Garshin’s stories and each story makes different impression on you! The stories that deeply impressed me were “Four Days” “The Red Flower”, “The Coward” and “The Signal”. I particularly loved “Four Days” with its unprecedented use of internal monologue and stress of consciousness, and the fearful and painful description of the devastating impacts of war on mankind, and the close contact with death and the expectation of death. The semi-autobiographical and subjective element in the stories add to their powerful effects and make them more sincere. “The Red Flower”, which is derived from Garshin’s painful personal experience in the mental institution, where he was taken straightjacketed to spend few month there, coupled with use of symbolic and mythical images and implications, shows Garshin’s mastery in creating masterpieces. On the other hand, this book encouraged me to carefully examine the relationship between the writer and his works; namely, to what extent a writer might be involved/detached from his work. For instance, you can find sad and melancholic images and events, as well as the recurrence of death and suicide motives, which might indicate (in my opinion) the existence of suicidal ideation in his mind then, and which he indirectly employed in his artistic writing. I so much loved Garshin’s advocacy of peace and his depiction of the ugliness of war and violence. The translation is beautiful and powerful too.

[Avi]

The guy's Russian. And dead. Must-read shelf.