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

by George Saunders

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.

We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

Nikita did not wish to go at all, but he had been accustomed not to have his own way and to serve others for so long that there was no one to hinder the departing travelers.

“Of course she’s only a woman! Where could she have seen anything? In my father’s time what was our house like? Just a rich peasant’s house: just an oatmill and an inn—that was the whole property. But what have I done in these fifteen years? A shop, two taverns, a flour-mill, a grain-store, two farms leased out, and a house with an iron-roofed barn,” he thought proudly. “Not as it was in Father’s time! Who is talked of in the whole district now? Brekhunov! And why? Because I stick to business. I take trouble, not like others who lie abed or waste their time on foolishness while I don’t sleep of nights. Blizzard or no blizzard I start out. So business gets done. They think money-making is a joke. No, take pains and rack your brains! You get overtaken out of doors at night, like this, or keep awake night after night till the thoughts whirling in your head make the pillow turn,” he meditated with pride. “They think people get on through luck. After all, the Mironovs are now millionaires. And why? Take pains and God gives. If only He grants me health!”

But there was no one to talk to….If

“If only that peasant doesn’t freeze to death! His clothes are so wretched. I may be held responsible for him. What shiftless people they are—such a want of education,” thought Vasili Andreevich, and he felt like taking the drugget off the horse and putting it over Nikita, but it would be very cold to get out and move about and, moreover, the horse might freeze to death. “Why did I bring him with me? It was all her stupidity!” he thought, recalling his unloved wife, and he rolled over into his old place at the front part of the sledge. “My uncle once spent a whole night like this,” he reflected, “and was all right.” But another case came at once to his mind. “But when they dug Sebastian out he was dead—stiff like a frozen carcass. If I’d only stopped the night in Grishkino all this would not have happened!”

“They say it’s drunkards that freeze,” he thought, “and I have had some drink.” And observing his sensations he noticed that he was beginning to shiver, without knowing whether it was from cold or from fear.

Nikita did not drink that night.

“What’s the use of lying and waiting for death? Better mount the horse and get away!” The thought suddenly occurred to him. “The horse will move when he has someone on his back. As for him,” he thought of Nikita—“it’s all the same to him whether he lives or dies. What is his life worth? He won’t grudge his life, but I have something to live for, thank God.”

From the time he had covered himself with the sackcloth and seated himself behind the sledge, Nikita had not stirred. Like all those who live in touch with nature and have known want, he was patient and could wait for hours, even days, without growing restless or irritable.

And it did not seem particularly dreadful, because besides the masters he had served here, like Vasili Andreevich, he always felt himself dependent on the Chief Master, who had sent him into this life, and he knew that when dying he would still be in that Master’s power and would not be ill-used by Him. “It seems a pity to give up what one is used to and accustomed to. But there’s nothing to be done, I shall get used to the new things.”

“Sins?” he thought, and remembered his drunkenness, the money that had gone on drink, how he had offended his wife, his cursing, his neglect of church and of the fasts, and all the things the priest blamed him for at confession. “Of course they are sins. But then, did I take them on of myself? That’s evidently how God made me. Well, and the sins? Where am I to escape to?”

He became frightened. “Lord, heavenly Father!” he muttered, and was comforted by the consciousness that he was not alone but that there was One who heard him and would not abandon him. He gave a deep sigh, and keeping the sackcloth over his head he got inside the sledge and lay down in the place where his master had been.

A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it’s doing what it was made to do.

In a sense, Vasili is killed by his fealty to the idea that, to preserve and broadcast his power, a “master” must be firm, strong, and unpersuadable.

Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.

If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, “Given how generally sweet people are, why is the world so fucked up?,” Gogol has an answer: we each have an energetic and unique skaz loop running in our heads, one we believe in fully, not as “merely my opinion” but “the way things actually are, for sure.”

So, to generalize a bit here: in a highly organized system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional. The elements seem to have been more precisely selected. Things escalate decisively; everything is to purpose.

“If once we admit—be it only for an hour or in some exceptional case—that anything can be more important than a feeling of love for our fellows, then there is no crime which we may not commit with easy minds….Men think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love. But there are no such circumstances….If you feel no love, sit still. Occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men….Only let yourself deal with a man without love…and there are no limits to the suffering you will bring on yourself.”

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.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath [and here he goes on to compile a long and terrible list of other Stalinist tortures that I’ll spare you from], not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”*