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

by George Saunders

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.

And, you know, whoever even once in his life has caught a perch or seen thrushes migrate in the autumn, when on clear, cool days they sweep in flocks over the village, will never really be a townsman and to the day of his death will have a longing for the open.

Growing up on farm aan dde doorns

My brother was unhappy in the government office. Years passed, but he went on warming the same seat, scratching away at the same papers, and thinking of one and the same thing: how to get away to the country.

Creative calling

Suddenly, the potential for fiction as a vital force in the world felt unlimited. It could be everything: the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised, a powerful form of entertainment, in the highest sense of that word. I suppose part of me had been wondering if the short story was going to be enough—enough for my grandiose ambitions, enough to accommodate my (youthful) ideas about art (that it should speak to everybody, to the best part of everybody, and make life better).

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!”

If you’re a pro-immigration person, are there anti-immigrant feelings down there inside you? Of course: that’s why you get so emotional when arguing for immigrants’ rights. You’re arguing against that latent part of yourself. When you get mad at a political opponent, it’s because he’s reminding you of a part of yourself with which you’re uncomfortable. You could, if forced, do a decent imitation of an anti-immigrant person. (Similarly, that angry anti-immigration advocate is railing against his inner leftist.)

The stories we’re reading here are among the best their authors ever wrote. But these authors also wrote lesser ones, and it’s important to read those too, if only to remind ourselves that nobody hits it out of the park every time, and that a masterpiece might have three or four test runs behind it, in which the artist was working some things out.

“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway,” said Randall Jarrell, a pretty good critic himself. “What is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.”

“So-called great men are always terribly contradictory,” Tolstoy told Gorky. “That is forgiven them with all their other follies. Though contradictoriness is not folly: a fool is stubborn, but does not know how to contradict himself.” Tolstoy knew how to contradict himself.

These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection. When reading and writing, we feel connection happening (or not). That’s the essence of these activities: ascertaining whether connection is happening, and where, and why.

And let’s be even more honest: those of us who read and write do it because we love it and because doing it makes us feel more alive and we would likely keep doing it even if it could be demonstrated that its overall net effect was zero,

So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does? Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know—it really does it. That change is finite but real. And that’s not nothing. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.

One of the dangers of writing a book about writing is that it might be perceived to be of the how-to variety. This book is not that. A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it. (How I will soon do it has to remain a continual mystery.) God save us from manifestos, even mine. (“An explanation does not go up to the hilt,” said Tolstoy.) The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.