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

by George Saunders

Once we begin reading the stories, which are, for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical, this idea may strike you as strange; but this is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer’s politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.

What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasion but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel. The result is awkward, funny, and true, touched with the spirit of the (odd) person doing the telling.

What I admire most about Chekhov is how free of agenda he seems on the page—interested in everything but not wedded to any fixed system of belief, willing to go wherever the data takes him. He was a doctor, and his approach to fiction feels lovingly diagnostic. Walking into the examination room, finding Life sitting there, he seems to say, “Wonderful, let’s see what’s going on!” It’s not that he didn’t have strong opinions (his letters are proof that he did). But in his best stories (and here I’d include, in addition to the three in this book, “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” “In the Ravine,” “Enemies,” “About Love,” and “The Bishop”) he seems to be using the form to move beyond opinions, to destabilize the usual ways we go about formulating them. If he has a program, it’s being wary of having a program. “My holy of holies,” he wrote, “is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.” He was criticized for this perceived lack of a political or moral stance. Tolstoy’s early assessment: “He is full of talent, he undoubtedly has a very good heart, but thus far he does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.” But this quality is what we love him for now. In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in th...