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

by George Saunders

They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool.

This is a good expectation of fiction writong

find this happening all the time. I like the person I am in my stories better than I like the real me. That person is smarter, wittier, more patient, funnier—his view of the world is wiser. When I stop writing and come back to myself, I feel more limited, opinionated, and petty. But what a pleasure it was, to have been, on the page, briefly less of a dope than usual.

A brief moment of Samadhi

the metaphorical world lightly infiltrating the physical.

Nicely worded

Death is coming for Vasili, and it’s nothing personal.

Death is coming ; it's not personal!!!

“If I go through the motions of belief, you (God) will spare me forever.”

What a saying

The wormwood has scared the fear of death right out of him and replaced it with a fear of something worse: the fear that he might again be overcome with fear.

Profound

As the old Catholic hymn says, “We must diminish, and Christ increase.”

We must diminish

is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz.

Skaz unreliable narrator

“improper narrative emphasis” and “misplaced assumption.”

Cool improper narrative emphasis misplaced assumption

I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.

Shut up and get out!

There is no happiness and there should be none, and if life has a meaning and a purpose, that meaning and purpose is not our happiness but something greater and more rational. Do good!”