A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

This “lesser writer’s” version reads like a sequence of unrelated events. Nothing causes anything else. Some things…occur. But we don’t know why. The result of the sequence (“they get lost”) feels out of relation with what came before. They just get lost randomly, for no reason, and this means nothing.

the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

It turns out, there is such a list of prime virtues, one we’ve been casually compiling as we’ve worked our way through these Russian stories: Be specific and efficient. Use a lot of details. Always be escalating. Show, don’t tell.

These stories we’ve just read were written during an incredible seventy-year artistic renaissance in Russia (the time of, yes, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, but also of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Ostrovsky, Tyutchev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and many more) that was followed by one of the bloodiest, most irrational periods in human history. Twenty million or more killed by Stalin, the torture and imprisonment of countless others; widespread starvation, even, in places, cannibalism; kids turning their own parents in, husbands ratting out their wives; the systematic and deliberate overthrow of the humanist values by which our four writers lived.

So, the artistic bounty of this period wasn’t enough to avert that disaster, and I suppose, in some ways, it might have (must have, actually) even contributed to it. Did it soften up the reading classes for the Bolsheviks? Cause an impatience for change that led to a too-convulsive revolution? Was all of this excellent art made by, and for, the bourgeoisie enabling and cloaking czarist excesses all along, and was this part of the reason the Stalinists turned so violently against humanist virtues?