Mostly About Stories

Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin

Alexander Pushkin is held by his countrymen to be their greatest writer, something which always strikes Westerners as unusual. The main problem is that Pushkin was primarily a poet, and poets, particularly Russian ones, are exceedingly difficult to translate and still harder to translate well. Yet Pushkin did write prose. His novel The Captain’s Daughter, and his short story “The Queen of Spades”, are among his best-known prose works. Another is the cycle of short stories, The Tales of Belkin, which I finished recently. While I can’t deny Pushkin’s verve for verse, his prose is rather more – if you’ll forgive the pun – prosaic.

What is particularly interesting about these five stories is more how we see in them the seeds out of which grew the magnificent prose that for so many exemplifies Russian literature. A saying often attributed to Dostoevsky is that Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat””. But Gogol’s story in turn came out of these tales.

For all their significance as trailblazers, though, that’s not to say that these five stories can’t stand on their own.

The Editor’s Introduction

The Tales of Belkin, as its title indicates, purport not to be Pushkin’s own work at all, but rather that of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The stories are introduced to us by Pushkin himself, acting as an editor (he did run a magazine for some time). This brief introduction, though, has much to say. Most of it is given over to a letter from one of Belkin’s friends, in which he describes the late author. Belkin was a young man, “humble and honest”, who let his estate in the country go to seed and died something of a recluse with many unfinished manuscripts lying around.

The letter-writer and editor note that the tales were all reportedly told to Belkin by someone else, and these names are given in a footnote by Pushkin. This, alongside the description of Belkin himself “average height, grey eyes, reddish hair, straight nose”, and the inclusion of a real date to the letter “Nov 16, 1830”, has the effect of giving The Tales of Belkin an extra dash of realism. We feel their author is a real person because he is treated like one. Many of the stories themselves feature a narrator as a character, who is then told the main story by someone else. This is quite a democratic approach, because many of these extra storytellers are from the lower ranks of society and it gives them a voice. It anticipates Turgenev’s Collection A Sportsman’s Sketches, where the approach is used to great effect.

“The Shot”

“The Shot”, the first of The Tales of Belkin, contains one of the classic examples of a duel in Russian literature, slotting in neatly next to Evgenii Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and that squib in Fathers and Sons. Our narrator, an officer, is beguiled by Silvio, a Russian with a distinctly non-Slavic name. Silvio is an excellent shot, and though he is not an officer but simply a nobleman living nearby, he spends much of his time with the officers. They, for their part, enjoy such traditional pleasures as carousing and shooting each other in duels. One evening Silvio suffers an embarrassment at the hands of another officer, for which he should have called him to a duel, but Silvio declines at great cost to his honour. Our narrator is confused by this, thinking that Silvio is possibly a coward. But then Silvio tells him his own story.

It turns out that Silvio cannot fight in a duel because he needs to get revenge on another man, and this requires Silvio to take care of his own life. The incident in question happened when Silvio was in the army. A newcomer turned out to be equal to Silvio in popularity and talent, and Silvio felt threatened, eventually finding an excuse to duel him. Alas, he was fighting a Russian of the new generation: “His indifference made me lose my temper. What was the point, I thought, of taking his life when he didn’t seem to give a damn what I did?” Silvio let the man live, but he was determined to get his revenge. He waits until he hears the man has married, then he goes to his country estate with the intention of finally shooting, this time against an opponent who has a reason to fear death.

It works. He does not hit his opponent, for his goal was simply to regain his lost honour. His rival survives, but shaken and embarrassed in front of his new wife. One thing that’s particularly interesting about “The Shot” is the way that it plays with our notions of truth. Not only is the narrator himself a character, but he hears the story in two halves. The first comes from Silvio, while the second part, detailing Silvio’s ultimate revenge, comes from the rival himself. The overall effect is to make us wary of trusting anyone by drawing our attention to the biases out of which our understanding of truth is necessarily built. With that said, I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the story itself, however much its ideas of honour and its narrative complexity are important for the later tradition, particularly with Lermontov, for instance.

“The Blizzard”

“The Blizzard” is another of The Tales of Belkin which seems particularly interested in narrative itself. Our heroine, Maria, has been “brought up on French novels” and has a rather overdeveloped imagination as a result. She and her lover, a poor soldier, are forbidden to meet by their parents, but together they hatch a plan to elope, relying on their parents to accept them once they are legally married. Alas, it does not work out. The night they are supposed to marry there is a terrible blizzard, and Vladimir, her husband-to-be, gets lost on the way to the church. Maria, meanwhile, reads in everything an ill omen as she heads there herself. Pushkin constantly switches perspective between the two lovers, before finally shifting forward to the next morning at Maria’s house, where she seems to wake up as if nothing had happened.

But it is not so. Maria falls ill from her failure to marry Vladimir, and her parents meanwhile forbid him to set one foot within their house ever again. Vladimir, dejected, returns to the army and fights against the French, who at this point are advancing on Russian territory (we are in 1812). We lose track of him, and then hear that he has died. But Maria, with a Romantic constancy, refuses to marry anyone else, and holds onto everything of Vladimir’s that she can lay her hands on. However, one day she meets Burmin, a Hussar, and they get on swimmingly. Yet for some reason, though time passes, he does not propose to her. At last, she pressures him into explaining himself, and he says that he’s already married. Now, finally, Burmin gives us the missing piece, explaining what actually happened in the church on the night Maria was awaiting Vladimir.

It is ridiculous. But the story is more interesting than it seems. On one level, it’s a magical “everything turns out okay” kind of ending. But it’s complicated by Pushkin’s shifting of perspectives, consciously manipulating the reader’s knowledge and setting limitations on it. Most importantly, it’s complicated by the way that Burmin himself does not recognise the woman he somehow married. While I don’t doubt she would have been wearing a veil at the time, it is still rather ominous. At least it seems so to me.

“The Undertaker”

“The Undertaker” is a rather unusual story, the most fantastical of the stories of The Tales of Belkin. Our hero is a grumpy old undertaker who has recently moved into a new house. Unlike, as Pushkin notes, the undertakers of Shakespeare or Walter Scott, his own is humourless. But that’s not to say the text is without humour, because Pushkin’s undertaker’s pleasure at hearing about other people dying, and his disappointment when they don’t, is all part of the comedy. One day the undertaker is invited by a German shoemaker to a birthday dinner, and there the old man drinks far too much. Made uneasy by a comment one of the Germans had made – that we should toast our clients and invite them to a party – he suggests he will indeed invite the dead back and goes home.

To his horror the dead do turn up. They seem in a good-enough mood, but unsurprisingly the undertaker is rather shocked by their presence. He ends up pushing a skeleton out of anger, and at this point the dead turn against him. At this point he faints, or rather “loses the presence of his soul”, and wakes up. The experience of death lends itself to a psychological reading quite easily. The undertaker has repressed his ambivalent feelings towards his clients – people whose deaths make him glad, though they should not – and these feelings burst out in a bad and drunken dream. The effect of this is immediate. We have a sense that the undertaker has awoken a changed man – his final words are to call in his daughters for tea, perhaps thereupon to make amends for treating them badly until then. We can only guess, for the story ends there.

This little story – it’s the shortest of all the Tales of Belkin – is still packed with things to think about. At its heart is that simple but rather unanswerable question which has always plagued Russian writers – how should we live? It takes a bad dream to jolt the undertaker out of his bad existence. Perhaps for Pushkin’s readers, it may take only this story.

“The Station Master”

Of all The Tales of Belkin perhaps my favourite was “The Station Master”. It tells the story of a station master, a man who was in charge of a station on a road where tired horses could be exchanged for fresh and food and rest sought, a little like an inn. The story is focused on questions of sympathy. It begins humorously, with an epigraph from Prince Vyazemskii (a poet) about how these station masters are little dictators within their realms, before Pushkin himself lists the difficulties and frustrations of using their services, including the pointless complaint we write optimistically in their feedback booklets. (How little, I thought, has changed!). But then Pushkin suddenly stops us to say: “if we really get into their position properly, then instead of frustration our hearts will be filled with an honest sympathy for them”.

We are introduced to a particular station master, whose daughter, Dunya, is his helper. He is extremely proud of her – touchingly so – and guards her fiercely. The daughter’s attractiveness is irresistible to the narrator, and he kisses her before he leaves. A few years later he comes by the same road and expects to see her again. Instead, he finds a changed place, an inn “without flowers in the windows, where all around there was a feeling of carelessness and decay”. The station master himself is still there, but his daughter has vanished, and without her he has fallen into ruin. He tells the narrator how she disappeared – kidnapped and married by an officer passing through – and how his own attempts to get her back from her new home failed.

Dunya, alas, was happy there, though we have a feeling that her position is unstable, as it always was for the many girls who left the provinces for the city during those days, and were reliant upon the goodwill of whoever had seduced them, for class differences meant that a marriage was unlikely. In the inn, the narrator draws our attention twice to a cycle of paintings showing the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible, and once the station master refers to Dunya in similar terms.

Yet one of the ways that Pushkin plays with his readers is to frustrate their expectations. The narrator leaves the station for the second time, and the next time he passes through the area he finds the man already long dead. He manages to locate his grave and there is told by a local about a noblewoman who once visited it, coming on a wonderfully rich carriage and with children in tow. It is no doubt Dunya herself. Though we are disappointed that no reconciliation between father and daughter took place, still Pushkin surprises us by showing that her own story at least has a happy ending.

In focusing so much on questions of sympathy and rank, “The Station Master” is an obvious inspiration for Gogol’s short stories, particularly “The Overcoat”. But it stands on its own. I cared for the characters and their fates, and that’s perhaps all that matters.

“The Noblewoman-Peasant”

“The Noblewoman-Peasant” is the final story of The Tales of Belkin. It tells the story of a romance between a noblewoman and a nobleman whose fathers are at odds with one another. Liza cannot meet Aleksei because as a noblewoman, she has no reason to go to his house without her father’s permission, and so she contrives a plan to bump into him in the countryside, dressed up as a peasant (so that nobody, least of all Aleksei himself, can suspect she is a noblewoman). It is an idiotic scheme, but Pushkin reminds us that it is not unbelievable for a country girl, whose entire knowledge of the world is from silly novels.

Liza successfully meets Aleksei, who himself is forced into a role – he doesn’t want to startle the peasant girl he thinks he’s caught by suggesting he’s a nobleman, so he pretends to be the nobleman’s assistant. Liza, meanwhile, has to contend with the fact that sexual mores among peasant girls aren’t quite the same as among noblewomen, and has to break character to tell Aleksei politely that she won’t be going to bed with him in the bushes. But this remark, delivered in the perfect Russian of a noblewoman, only piques Aleksei’s interest still further. They meet again, and again, and fall in love – even though both, faking their identities, know that the relationship can go no further.

But then, amazingly, their fathers make up and the two youths are supposed to meet. Even worse, the fathers decide the children would be a good match. Liza does not wish to reveal her deception, so she once more adopts a fake role, dressing herself up unrecognizably in a hideous dress, covering herself with makeup, and refusing to speak any language other than French. Liza survives the meeting, but Aleksei’s love for her peasant alter-ego grows unstoppable. The “Romantic idea” of marrying a peasant comes to absorb him, and he makes ready to propose. Luckily, this story does end happily, and just as madly as it began.

But under even this comic exterior, there’s a lot going on. As Aleksei’s father pressures him to marry Liza we have a sense of the generational conflicts that will be especially prominent in the 1860s, with works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Meanwhile, though there’s a slight irony to its description of noblewomen in the countryside, Pushkin nevertheless demonstrates the difficult boredom of life there for them, practically trapped in their rooms and with nothing to do but read and gossip.

Conclusion

The Tales of Belkin are a cycle of short stories, and one thing that I looked for while reading them was points of connection between them, beyond their own imaginary author. It is not easy to say what they are all about, at least once one discards such broad and probably useless generalisations like “the meaning of life”, or “love”, and so on. Instead, I think the clue might be in the editor’s introduction. The stories are all about imagination. The undertaker’s imagination changes his life for the better, while Liza’s idea of dressing up as a peasant, however risible, ends up getting her exactly what she wants. I admit that it is not a fool proof suggestion, but it seems to work for most of the stories. Pushkin is interested in the ways that we tell stories, in narrative strategies, and imagination is part of that.

Taken separately, these stories are simply stories, but taken together The Tales of Belkin are in some sense an exploration of the ways we tell stories, and what their value can be. Either way, they’re worth reading if you come across some Pushkin lying around.

Murder and Passion in Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is the most famous of Nikolai Leskov’s short stories, at least in English anyway. This is no doubt because its title sets the story in a familiar cultural context. But in reality the tale has little to do either with Macbeth or with its heroine. Like Turgenev’s “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District”, the comparison to Shakespeare is much more parodic than anything else. Here we have a tale of a simple woman with a simple goal – power. But Leskov, rather than focusing on the gruesome details, asks two important questions. The first is why does this woman, our “Lady Macbeth”, start to kill? And the second is how far should we actually blame her for the killings?

Introduction to Leskov’s Style

My most popular post on this blog is my summary of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”, which is partly about Leskov’s style of writing. Benjamin of course is not the only important critic to have written on Leskov, but I do think that it is hard to read Leskov without having Benjamin’s ideas in the back of your mind. Briefly put, Benjamin draws a distinction between stories and novels. The former were once very popular, but the growth of the bourgeoisie and then the horrors of the First World War led to their demise. This is because stories are characterised by deliberate ambiguity – they are based off experience, which means that stories necessarily change based on who is telling them and when. Novels, meanwhile, aim to have that newspaper-like quality of fact to them. Yes, we have unreliable novelistic narrators, but stories are more moral, and fallible as we are.

Many of Leskov’s tales are tales that his narrator recounts hearing from someone else. Frame narratives of this sort are an easy way of recognising stories – Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches uses a similar structure. The Leskov story that I translated badly, “A Righteous Man”, is another example. “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is not a frame narrative, but it has certain other qualities that give it a story-like quality. Leskov’s story is written in a very conversational tone, with a strong sense of readership – “From time to time in our country we come across such characters who leave such an impression on us that even after many years we feel a shudder of horror when we remember them.” The first line (my translation) already sets the story within a world familiar to its readers (“our”, “we come across”).

There is also a sense not of those frustrating lapses of memory that characterise certain modernist unreliable narrators, but just the simplicity and exaggeration that come to all of us when we try to tell a story. We are told of Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, our heroine, that she “once played out a terrible drama, after which our noblemen started to call her Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, not altogether seriously”. The narrative style paints the narrator as an insider, a local, and also sets up a kind of chorus – the average citizens of the countryside where our story takes place. Implicitly, it thereby creates the moral framework for the story, telling us who are to be our moral compass.

Your Average Country Merchant Family

And so, Katerina Lvovna, our future Lady Macbeth. We learn that she is in her early twenties, good looking – the usual things anyone in the 19^th century thinks we should know about a woman. But though Leskov is not a champion of progress, there’s a definite sense in “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” that he wants us to treat her with more sympathy than she might receive otherwise, in spite of the first paragraph. As soon as we finish learning about her appearance we get to the other important attribute – marital status. “She was given in marriage to our merchant Izmailov” – in the Russian the passive construction sounds more natural, but it’s essential here. Katerina Lvovna is acted upon – as a Russian woman, she never has no power to act for herself. Why does she marry an older man? Because “she was a poor girl and didn’t have a say in the matter”.

Once the marriage gets going life doesn’t get better for Katerina Lvovna. She fails in the only task she had – giving birth to an heir. Probably because her much older husband spends most of his time working and doesn’t seem to feel much desire towards her at all. Without even a child to entertain her, Katerina Lvovna’s life is extremely boring. The narrator is always attempting to explain her character, because he wants to make the murders comprehensible. Katerina Lvovna is “passionate, and, having grown up in poverty, she had grown used to freedom and simplicity” – both things denied to her in her new home. And being not a reader and not a great believer, she has nothing at all to do. But what is worst of all is that “nobody, as happens, paid even the slightest attention to her boredom.” She is simply alone.

Romance!

That is, until one day one of the workmen, Sergei, starts to come after her. The outside world of the servants, with its “jolly words and jokes”, is contrasted with the dead house Katerina Lvovna lives in. Though she is warned by a wise female servant that Sergei “the bastard, will flatter and flatter and bring any woman to sin”, Katerina Lvovna falls head-over-heels in love with the first person to ever show an interest in her. We readers see immediately that he is playing with her; she does not learn the truth until almost the end of the tale.

Katerina Lvovna, simple as she is, is taken by an irresistible force and finds herself “in spite of her intentions” reciprocating his physical desires. Katerina Lvovna’s experience of love is, because of her lack of experience, dominated by things she does not understand but nevertheless accepts. She is strangely disconnected from her own actions – drinks are “drunk”, kisses are “kissed” and food is “eaten”. Can we really blame her for thinking that this is what life is all about, like an uneducated Anna Karenina?

…And Murder

How do we get from illicit love to murder? It’s as easy as getting caught in the act by one’s father-in-law. After getting punished (her husband is away on a work trip) Katerina Lvovna decides to poison him. Or rather, he is poisoned. Even here, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” prefers not to assign blame: “He died in just the same fashion as the rats which Katerina Lvovna poisoned in the storeroom did”. After killing her father-in-law, and somewhat encouraged by Sergei, Katerina Lvovna then kills her husband, and then his remaining heir – a relative. She, meanwhile, is pregnant with Sergei’s child. But as she and Sergei are finishing off the heir they are caught by the townsfolk and sent to a penal colony for the novella’s dénouement, in which Katerina Lvovna finally discovers that although she desperately loves Sergei, he’s just as everyone said he was – an untrustworthy rogue.

The Cat and the Conscience

What makes “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” interesting, which totally passed me by on my first reading of the story, is the question of responsibility. We are initially led by the story’s use of “the people”, especially at the scene in which Katerina Lvovna is finally caught (by a huge crowd of townsfolk surrounding the house and trying to break in), to view the story as simply one of justice – if you do something wrong, you will be punished. But the question of conscience and knowledge complicates this picture. Katerina Lvovna doesn’t really have a sense of right or wrong. Whereas Sergei hesitates, “goes pale”, at some of the more unpleasant moments, such as when he realises another death will be necessary, Katerina Lvovna does not think about such things. What is striking is her purity – at one point we read that Katerina Lvovna “smiles and breathes like a perfect baby”.

A recurring image is that of a cat. Katerina Lvovna dreams this cat twice, but when she reaches out to touch it, it dissolves in her fingers. The second time this happens the cat transforms into the head of the dead father-in-law, shocking Katerina Lvovna half-to-death. The dream is obviously a representation of her unacknowledged conscience, but even with that knowledge it’s not the same thing as saying that Katerina Lvovna is particularly guilty. She has lived in a world which grants women, especially merchant women, no freedoms whatsoever, and she has not the mind to entertain herself. Her husband speaks a terrible truth when he tells her after discovering her betrayal that “our power over you has not been taken away, and never can be taken away”. Note the first-person plural he uses – his power over her is at least in part linguistic.

Conclusion: Who is to Blame?

Katerina Lvovna gives herself up to love, or rather passion, because the romance with Sergei is the first time she has ever felt anything or had anyone feel anything for her. It’s pretty heavily implied that her husband only married her because his previous wife had died without giving him a child, and we read nothing of her own parents. Meanwhile, in killing and gaining control of her husband’s capital, Katerina Lvovna is for the first time playing an active role in shaping her future. Should we blame her for choosing a choice over passivity, emotions over boredom? She definitely makes poor choices, but given the terrible world she lives in, there are mitigating factors.

The narrator himself certainly doesn’t seem sure what to make of her. The noblemen’s comment at the start of the story, that she is a “Lady Macbeth”, misses the point – where Lady Macbeth is a confident schemer and actor, Katerina Lvovna scarcely seems aware of what she’s doing and is herself constantly manipulated by outside forces – men, love, power. The title of Leskov’s tale, then, in drenched in irony. In the depths of Russia (admittedly, Mtsensk isn’t actually in the depths, but it’s hardly Moscow) the best we can be is a petty murderer…

The first time I read this story I was unimpressed. This post comes from a second reading, this time in the original Russian. And to be perfectly honest, I’m still not a huge fan. I just don’t feel there’s actually that much going on in the story. It’s too simple, in a way. I can’t find anything to think about. Yes, there are some interesting things Leskov does with language – mostly to show Katerina Lvovna’s lack of control over herself in general, and her initial passivity and later power. But beyond that, it’s just a story about a woman who murders three people on the basis of relatively understandable reasons. But that’s just it.

If you’ve read Leskov and like him, do feel free to correct me here. What am I missing?

Magic Sentences – Flaubert’s Three Tales

The thing with Flaubert is that he knows how to write a sentence. And not one of those magnificent but coldly complex sentences, of the sort that Henry James or William Gass carved out on a regular basis – a sentence that you admire like you admire a marble sculpture – from a distance, aesthetically. No, what Flaubert wrote were real, living, breathing sentences. I can’t read a sentence by Flaubert without wishing his ghost could find its way into my wrist and guide it to write something similar. Flaubert, this superhuman master of realism, is one of the only authors whose style I feel obliged to imitate. Because although he does nothing fancy, unlike almost everyone else in the world each and every sentence he wrote somehow comes out original and fresh.

He somehow could not think in clichés. He was repulsed by them. The only thing we as readers and writers can do to avoid falling completely under his linguistic spell is to try to remind ourselves that his work was the result of an extreme effort – these novels and stories were the real sculptures. Whereas the likes of Zola and Balzac were pumping out novels faster than your average 19^th century bourgeois French intellectual could read them, Flaubert barely managed a handful over the course of his life.

Whether or not you like the content is in a way besides the point. Personally, I didn’t like the plot of Madame Bovary that much. But the Three Tales, which I read last week, are rather fun. They are all very different. They range from the beautiful “A Simple Heart” to the weird “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” to the also weird but now in addition confusing “Herodias”. What was surprising for me, knowing Flaubert only from Madame Bovary, was seeing Flaubert’s range. Here’s a medieval tale, here a piece of historical fiction. It’s surprising because I tend to associate realism with writing about one’s own time and world, but Flaubert shows that neither need be a limitation.

Anyway, on to the stories, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation!

A Simple Heart

“A Simple Heart” is the most standard of the stories collected in Three Tales. It is essentially the telling of the life story of a single woman, Félicité, who is a servant. Though she has the appearance of “a woman made out of wood, driven as if by clockwork”, that does not mean the tale is boring. There is an element of daring in this story, because Félicité is from low down in society, and in “A Simple Heart” there is neither ogling nor idealisation of the poor going on – Félicité simply is a human being, in spite of her simplicity. As a young lady she was disappointed in love, was divided from her siblings as a result of the need to earn a living, and eventually ended up in the service of a Madame Aubain, who is not particularly pleasant as a master, though she could, one supposes, be a bit worse.

Allow me now to mention a sentence, or rather two. We have been learning about the guests who turn up at Madame Aubain’s house. We have just read about the Marquis de Grémanville, who is somewhat profligate and prone to alcohol and overall not entirely welcome. The paragraph ends, and the next begins, as follows:

“I think you have had enough for today, Monsieur de Grémanville! Do come and see us again soon!” And she would close the door behind him.
But she was always delighted to welcome Monsieur Bourais, a retired solicitor.

What a transition! I had to stop reading and fetch my pencil. It is the most prosaic thing in the world, and yet, so perfect. The closing of the door and the closing of the paragraph, the way that we feel the sudden delight of Félicité seeing Monsieur Bourais thanks to the suddenness of his sentence, as if we ourselves were opening the door! I know, it is a minor thing. But like learning the parts of a mechanical watch, being able to look out for these details and savour them is what makes the Three Tales, and Flaubert in general, so wonderful.

Félicité works tirelessly. Her cares, for the children of Madame Aubain, for her own nephew when she meets him, all result in dejection and failure. But Félicité, who has a simple faith, just keeps going with life: “She doted on her mistress with dog-like fidelity and the reverence that might be accorded to a saint”. In some sense Flaubert’s tale reminds me a little of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Both stories take someone whom society was inclined to think relatively worthless – a servant and a petty scribe – and show that they have a certain dignity about them, in spite of their low origins. Félicité is treated awfully by those around her, but she does not lose her faith. And as a result, the reader comes out at the end of the story with a sense of the strength and the value of every individual. A better moral couldn’t be found.

The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator

I didn’t like the other two of the Three Tales as much as I did “A Simple Heart”. I am a bore, I know. “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” tells the story of how a certain Julian became a saint. As a theme, this is rather off-putting to the modern reader. I mean, who reads about saints these days? The most we might expect is a boring-old morality tale. And of course, that is part of the story. But there is more to it.

Julian is born in a castle, and to his mother and father respectively it is prophesied that he will become a saint and an emperor. As a young man he is a hunter, and here was something I had not expected – Flaubert’s violence. This tale is pretty unpleasant to read for even the most steak-loving of readers. Julian kills everything. For pages and pages we read about how he slaughters – and I mean slaughters – this or that creature. “They circled round him, trembling with fear and looking up at him with gentle pleading eyes”. And he kills them anyway. Lakes of blood, and all that – it’s all here! Eventually though, the animals fight back and Julian is told a curse is upon him. He will kill his father and mother. Uh-oh.

To save his family Julian runs off, becomes a mercenary, and gets a palace of his own – as you did, back then, in the days of knights and shining armour. Here’s another sentence: “The whole palace was so quiet that you could hear the rustle of a scarf or the echo of a sigh”. What suggestion!

Anyway, Julian does kill his parents, in the kind of ridiculous comedy-of-errors manner that is only possible in Greek tragedies and the Middle Ages, and commits to a life of voluntary wandering. Julian’s suffering as he wanders is just as intensely described as the suffering he inflicted on the animals, which meant it was effective even as it was difficult to read. But it is the end of the story that is the hardest part of all to read. A leper comes to Julian asking for help and Julian does everything he can to help the man, even hugging him tightly while they are both naked so as to give the man his warmth. I know we don’t have lepers these days, but Flaubert’s descriptions made me shrink back in disgust all the same.

Yet this, I think, is what makes the story so powerful – it really makes us feel what it must have been like to be a saint. We feel after reading like we have an idea of what is asked for. This is in stark contrast to, say, Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” where it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tolstoy and his main character just need to get a better therapist and maybe go outside more. Julian’s faith feels lived in a way that Sergius’s always felt on the edge of parody.

Herodias

Finally, the last of the Three Tales is “Herodias”, Flaubert’s retelling of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. I basically only know that story from the Klimt painting. And I have just googled it and discovered that the painting has nothing to do with this story to begin with, which means I know even less about the story than I thought. I didn’t like the story. I found it hard to follow. There are far too many characters and I do feel that readers without a sense of the background (more than just the tl;dr “John the Baptist gets decapitated” summary) are going to be just as confused as I am. Perhaps if I read it again slowly, after reading the Bible version, things would be clearer.

As it stands, I appreciated bits of it but not the whole thing. Moments like this description of a dancer will remain in my memory –

“Her feet moved rhythmically one in front of the other to the sounds of a flute and a pair of hand cymbals. She extended her arms in a circle, as if she were calling to someone who was fleeing her approach. She ran after him, light as a butterfly, like Psyche in search of her lover, a soul adrift, as if she were about to take flight.”

So too will the speech given by John the Baptist himself, which has a certain Biblical force about it. And finally there is this image, as the ruler of who has had John the Baptist imprisoned looks out over the desert, which has the same power as Shelley’s Ozymandias:

“His spirits sank as he looked out over the desert; in its fold and convolutions he seemed to see the shapes of ruined amphitheatres and palaces.”

But overall, I must say the story left me more confused than awed.

Conclusion

At under a hundred pages in my edition, the Three Tales are short enough to read over the course of three hours – in my case I read one each day. And I am certainly glad I read them, even “Herodias”. I really can’t express fully how giddy with excitement Flaubert’s prose makes me, even though it is distorted by translation. And in his use of historical topics, and not just the world around him, he has reminded me of the full range of literary possibilities associated with realism. Finally, these stories do have a certain thread of continuity to them. All of the Three Tales are concerned with faith, and the differing ways it manifests itself. And in the way that the faiths here are in the most part unusual – the prophet’s faith of John the Baptist, the saint’s faith of Julian – these stories are interesting and powerful to read, and not just beautiful. Though they are, certainly, that too.