Race and Redemption in Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Phenomenal, unbelievable, awesome: Home is one of those books I cannot recommend enough. In many ways a quiet, boring affair, much like Gilead before it, Home is so deeply packed with life, lived and felt, that it expands inside us like the impression of tree does, the moment we stop walking and start to give it the attention that its complexity and majesty undoubtedly deserves. Home takes place almost contemporaneously to Gilead, and the characters are shared between the two works, but the tone is very different. Gilead had seen the aging Reverend Ames writing letters full of love to his young son, consigning his own failures and guilts mostly to the margins. But Home, which takes us into the home of Ames’s friend Reverend Boughton as it deals with the return of a prodigal son, Jack, and a failed daughter, Glory, is a much more ambivalent tale.

The book is filled with tensions, with guilt, with shame, with pain. But at the same time it shines with the radiance of love, conditional and unconditional, and faith and grace. Unlike Gilead, where Ames’s occasional digressions on doctrinal matters such as baptism may have turned off readers with limited exposure to the Christian tradition, Home is a much more down-to-earth book in terms of its religious fundament. The central questions concerning redemption and grace are, I hope, a little more palatable to people, and more relevant to their own lives.

Glory

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” Her father said, and her heart sank.

The opening line of Home is brutal, and immediately informs us of the pain at the centre of the novel. Glory is the youngest daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, youngest of eight children, and almost forty when the book begins in the late 1950s. Where other brothers and sisters have made successful marriages, or started successful careers, Glory worked as a teacher while engaged in a long courtship with a man who ultimately abandoned her. Apparently married, she could not even return to her teaching job. And so she has returned home, the only place that will offer her a refuge.

Her father, Reverend Boughton, is not the sprightly, young-at-heart man that Ames was. He spends most of Home being carried from chair to bed to chair. He retired from the pulpit ten years before the story begins, and his mind has declined where Ames’s remains nimble. But he is determined to make his home be a place where his children are welcome, and to show them the unconditional love of parents towards their children, no matter what they have done. Glory has come home, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, so she gives herself up to her father, caring for him as best she can, cooking and cleaning and doing the practical chores he is too weak to do. But she is desperately lonely. In the town she grew up in, all she has is the radio for company.

The Prodigal Son

That is until her father receives a letter from Jack. Jack is the prodigal son, the vanisher – he hasn’t been home in twenty years. As a child he was the only Boughton to scorn the church and steal and hide away. Eventually, he turned to alcohol too. What hangs over him, at least in the eyes of others, are two particular acts, committed long enough ago. The first is that he seduced and then abandoned a young girl, whose child later died; the second is that he did not return home for his mother’s funeral either. But he is his father’s son, and Boughton is determined to show him kindness.

The letter that arrives says Jack will be home soon. Boughton’s joy is so simple, so pure: “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand… I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in the top right-hand drawer… So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

And though he delays, and sends further letters, Jack does eventually come:

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Robinson has an eye for the perfect detail. The action of Home takes place almost entirely within the walls of the Boughton home, and between these three people. But Robinson uses every sense, every minor gradation of feeling, to paint an extraordinary picture of family life in all its painful, wondrous, complexity.

Jack

Jack is back for his own reasons. For Glory, her older brother’s return is in a way a blessing. “At least I know what is required of me know, and that is something to be grateful for”. They have not seen each other for years, and Home is a record of intimacy gained, lost, fought for. Where Glory was duped, Jack is guilty. Most of all, he is battling against the notion of predestination, the idea that his life has already been decided for him, and that no matter what he may do he is doomed to hellfire because of something incorrect in his nature, in the very nature that God had given to him. He is a modern day Ivan Karamazov, knowledgeable about God and the Bible but unable to accept them for his own reasons, even as he rages against the despair stemming from having a terrible black hole inside him.

Jack comes home, he tends to the garden, he fixes the family car. He drinks, he hides, he hurts himself. His alcoholism is one part of his character, but in a way, as an addiction it sums up the heart of his problem. Anyone who has faced addiction will know the way that it can feel like predestination to fall back into old habits. No matter how we try, it seems as if an external force, like a cruel god, drags us back towards our vices. When faced with addiction, it’s sometimes impossible to feel that we can ever change, that we can ever right our course. While the two reverends discuss the thorny nature of predestination within their respective churches, it is Lila, Ames wife (and heroine of Robinson’s third Gilead novel), who steps up to reassure Jack. “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Like Jack, Lila has spent most of her life as an outcast. But after she meets Ames, something we only really hear about vaguely in Gilead, her life changes for the better. She is, in a way, saved. Does Jack redeem himself? Does Jack get saved? I’m not sure these questions are the point of Home. Jack comes home, and he leaves again. Life is not neatly tied up, and Home recognises that. In Jack’s story – here, in Gilead, and no doubt in Robinson’s latest novel, Jack –what matters is the process. Jack’s life is a swinging between salvation and perhaps, as he claims, perdition. And in our own lives, full of mistakes and guilt and yet bursting with beauty and always with the possibility of making things right again, Jack appears as a thoroughly human, thoroughly sad, brother.

Race and Religion in Home

Last summer I read a lot of books about race, but Home is probably more effective than any of them. At the end of Gilead we learn about why Jack is interested in racial tensions, and in Home this information is once again saved for the end. But early on, when Glory finds him reading W. E. B. DuBois, we have a sense that even though the village of Gilead is made up of traditional rural white Iowans, race will someway figure in the novel. Later, to entertain their father, Glory and Jack get him a TV set. Home is set during the height of the American civil rights movement, and Jack has spent a lot of time in the South. His father, meanwhile, appears scarcely to have even left his state.

Now, I confess, being not an American, I know little about the civil rights movement, so I may get a few bits wrong. As they watch the television, and read about protests in the newspaper, a division appears in the family.

After reading about white police with riot sticks attacking black peaceful demonstrators, Boughton speaks to calm his son: “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

But Jack replies. “Some people will probably remember it.”

Boughton is a religious man, but he is not necessarily a wise one. His vision of the world is small. The idea that the African Americans who were suffering may have slightly longer memories than his own, watching them on the television, is not something that comes naturally to him. It is less hypocrisy, than ignorance, but it remains a problem. When Jack cries “Jesus Christ” after a particularly brutal moment, Boughton’s anger is aimed at his blasphemy, rather than the actions of the police. Eventually, he attempts to be conciliatory. “Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We have to forgive each other.”

At times like this Robinson describes Boughton as “statesmanlike” – she uses this adjective several times, and in a way that is far more ironic than anything else. Boughton asks who can judge, but the answer, for readers, is clearly that we can. We know better, we know now the suffering of black Americans thanks to social media and publicised brutalities. We know that the civil rights movement has not finished, and Boughton’s faux-conciliatory remarks which paper-over real and legitimate suffering are just the same ill-judged remarks we hear today, from certain sections of society. The blacks were rioting, they were violent. But even when disproved we continue to hold fast to these lies. I don’t mean to disregard the violence of certain protests last year, only to indicate that there is a continuity not just in terms of the problems, but also in how they are represented and dealt with.

Robinson’s story reveals that underlying hypocrisy. Yes, we should avoid judgement in many things. But in matters of racial justice, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t tolerate brutality, refraining from judgement becomes a moral stance. And we know, I hope we know, enough to know that things that were wrong then, in the 1950s, must still be wrong now.

Conclusion

Gilead was in many ways a paean to the blessings of the everyday little things that make life so magical but which we often pass over without a thought. And Home is filled with that same, slightly religious sentiment. But Home goes further than that, in that it asks moral questions too. Are we managing to be good people, even as we enjoy the world? Is there a chasm between our beliefs and our actions? Are we Christians or whatever to all people, or only to a few? In its portrayal of Jack’s tortured complexity, both his good and his bad, and his struggle for what perhaps we could call redemption, Home is a much more gritty book than its predecessor. But it is a book whose message is every bit as important as that of Gilead. Perhaps, unfortunately, given the world we currently live in, it may be even more so.

But either way it’s fantastic, brilliant, and well worth reading.

Thinking Too Much: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, whose heyday in the English language was in the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of men and women like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, is a writer whose greatness we hear about more often than we actually sit down and read him. He was an indisputably superhuman being: writer of plays, poetry, prose, a statesman, a scientist, a man who saw battle in the Napoleonic Wars – Goethe seemed to have the experience and the talents and the range of a hundred others. He even, unlike his contemporaries, Schiller and Hölderlin, managed to live the entirety of his life without dying prematurely or going mad – no small feat for someone whose dates might make us term him “Romantic”. But still, we don’t read him. We know his main works – Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and of course Werther, and perhaps a smattering of his poetry – but only second-hand.

I don’t know why that is. The common explanation is that Goethe ultimately came to embody a distant, lofty, Enlightenment-era sensibility that makes him boring to the modern reader, growing up in the shadow of emotional, irrational, Romanticism. Perhaps there are simply a dearth of good translations? In my time at Cambridge I have read precisely two works by Goethe – Urfaust, an early version of Faust: Part 1, and Iphigenia, a play. Yet for the German tradition he is as central as Shakespeare is in our own. And so I went and bought myself a 14-volume collected edition of his works, and hope to read at least some of them, over the coming year(s). Being interested in canonical European literature and not knowing Goethe is rather embarrassing, after all. And if he is really a genius, I am sure he will have something interesting to say to me.

It’s just a shame he doesn’t in Werther!

The Sorrows of Young Werther

With the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe became an international sensation. But often what is initially popular doesn’t stand the test of time. Werther is perhaps more notorious now than anything else, on account of the various copycat suicides it inspired. I have to say, for me, a 21st century sad person, I find it strange how this book could have brought anyone to end their life. The gulf of sensibilities seems huge here. This story is not a semi-respectable literary love-triangle so much as one idiot’s selfish, solipsistic, obsession for another human being which brings torment to her and destruction to him. But, as always with German, it could just be that my understanding of the text was negatively impacted by my knowledge of the language. Anyway, Werther is important, so I suppose I must try to find what’s good and interesting in it. Let’s see.

Werther

Werther is structured predominantly as a series of letters from young Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Later on, the novel also includes a few letters to Lotte (the heroine), some of Werther’s translation work, and some third person narration. All of these formal elements are perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel, and I’ll write about them towards the end of this post.

The initial impression Werther’s letters make is that of an overwhelming emotional consciousness. Werther is emotional about absolutely everything. Even a decision like trying to live in the present is fraught with feelings: “I want to enjoy the present, and what has past should stay there in the past”. One of the central ideas of Werther is stated early on in a lamentation from Werther – “oh best of friends, what is the human heart!” The answer to the question, at least the one the book offers, is profoundly limited – we can’t really know the human heart. Werther’s letters, emotional, increasingly deranged, are only ever his letters. We are drawn into a world of pure subjectivity, so that it’s impossible to have any confidence about what is actually going on outside Werther’s head.

But we should have a go. Werther has ended up in a small village, there to do absolutely nothing. I believe the reason for his exile involves a romantic entanglement with Wilhelm’s sister, but I can’t be sure because the whole thing takes up a single page and is promptly forgotten. Here, in the peace and quiet, he makes friends with the locals, and eventually comes across a young lady, Charlotte – or Lotte, to her intimates. Lotte is, in Werther’s eyes, so absolutely amazing that to call her an angel is not enough. She is perfect, not just in her beauty, but in embodying a kind of idealised feminine existence: her mother is dead, so she looks after her younger siblings in her place. How amazing, how wonderful! Did I mention that she is engaged? Well… yes… but “I received the news somewhat indifferently”. Lotte reads, Lotte is natural and “artless”, a pure being plucked from Rousseau dreams.

Lotte

Yes, Werther is head-over-heels in love. What passion! But is it really passion, given that “often I didn’t even hear the words she spoke to me”. Werther’s imagination is so great, so hard-working, that it envelopes poor Lotte. They do have their moments, like when they are heading home after a storm and it’s all very spooky and intense. Memorably, she utters the name “Klopstock”, a well-known German poet of the day, while looking at the sky. Wilhelm, wisely, picks up on what Werther himself doesn’t, and suggests he leave before it’s too late. Werther, of course, does not. And at this point we have the first of his letters to Lotte: ridiculous, emotional, and dangerous too. Her husband-to-be has been away so far, but what will come of it when he returns?

“Wilhelm, is it just a phantom speaking, when we think all’s well?” Werther switches with alarming regularity from the deepest of joys to the deepest of sadnesses. “We long, ah, long to give our entire being over to something, and be filled with the bliss of a single, great, and powerful feeling”. He is an artist, who naturally barely gets anything done. He manages three incomplete portraits of Lotte. At one point he blames the peace and quiet of the rural idyll for his failure to work, but once he has tempestuous feelings he doesn’t become that much more successful either.

We hear Lotte rarely, at least while the narrative still consists of Werther’s letters. The effect of this is suffocating. We struggle to see her beneath Werther’s description of her, which is always filled with the possibility that he is deceiving himself (“Yes, I feel, and in this I am sure I can trust my heart… that she loves me!”).

Albert

In the first edition of Werther, published in 1774, Lotte’s fiancé Albert is a less sympathetic character than he appears in the revised version of Werther from 1787 which most people read these days. The thirteen years clearly gave Goethe time to mellow and let him turn upon his hero more than his youth once allowed. Albert is in many ways Werther’s opposite. Where Werther is emotional and prone to extremes, Albert is dour and serious and practical. Unlike Werther, who doesn’t appear to do any work at all, Albert’s main characteristic is his “Emsigkeit”, or industriousness. When the topic of passion comes up, Albert’s views are predictably sensible: “a man who lets his passions throw him about loses all his self-control and appears as a drunk or else as a madman”. For Werther, the Romantic, this is sacrilege. But Werther loves Lotte, so he keeps visiting their house.

The thought has just come to me that Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee have a lot in common. Both feature a love triangle where the emotional man loses out to the industrious man in the pursuit of the somewhat emotional girl. But the key difference is that Reinhard, the hero of Immensee, fails to propose to Elisabeth on time because of his sensibilities (he wants the proposal to be something special), while Werther arrives too late to make a proposal at all. Immensee is the tragic story of how emotions and hesitancy spoil a beautiful romance; Werther is the story of how a refusal to think rationally lets Werther imagine into being a romance where he has no right to, leaving him a far less sympathetic protagonist.

In the comparison between Albert and Werther we have played out what is one of the fundamental dramas of the 19th century – namely that of feeling against reason. In an increasingly industrial, increasingly business-driven world, feeling becomes a liability while hard-work and cool intelligence assume a dominant position in bourgeois society. In Werther, Lotte may regret that she is not with Werther, but she does not leave Albert, and Werther takes his own life. His sensibility dies with him, while Albert and Lotte will no doubt have plenty of little industrious children of their own. But perhaps all this is eminently sensible – only through the marriage of reason with feeling can feeling hope to survive. Werther, who wouldn’t know reason if it hit him over the head, just isn’t right for this world.  

Style and Structure

Werther’s second half, which details Werther’s precipitous decline into the abyss, is more interesting than the first, which had ended with him at last managing to leave Lotte’s village and do something else for a month. It is here that Goethe starts playing around with form. As long as we inhabit Werther’s insane letters, we are forced to accept his worldview: “What else is human fate but to go beyond its bounds, to drink the cup right to the dregs?”

But at about three quarters of the way through the book the letters stop and we have a message from the publisher, which comes as something of a shock. After the closed world of Werther’s letters, suddenly we have a sense of objectivity. It gives the reader the necessary perspective to realise that Werther really is going mad, just in case they hadn’t realise this earlier. We continue reading letters from Werther, but now they are broken up with information about how they were received, or what Werther was doing. We hear Lotte’s voice, her fear that perhaps “it is only because you couldn’t possess me that your desire gained so much power over you.” What a sensible thought. It is too bad that Werther is unwilling to listen to her.

The third person narration naturally allows us to hear about Werther’s suicide, as being dead makes it hard to write a letter (though of course there are plenty of literary workarounds). I think that the main effect of this narrative rupture is to ironize what had otherwise been deadly serious – Werther’s love. As the publisher goes through the letters left on Werther’s desk, including at least two letters that purport to be the last one’s he’ll ever send to Lotte, it’s hard not to feel that Werther is much less the emotional hero of the novel, and more a fool who came and destroyed the peace and happiness of others. His translation of part of the Ossian poems, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, is beautiful, but at the same time hints at the unoriginality of his own feelings. Is Werther just imitating others, even at his most emotional?

Conclusion

I have written before about how writing a blog post makes me appreciate works of literature in ways I would not have otherwise and find enjoyment in works that otherwise frustrated me. But I am not sure that this is one of those times. Werther is too imbalanced – too much feeling, not enough reason. For the modern sensibility, Werther’s failings are too much his own. There are plenty of things to be sad about in life, in love as in everything else, without letting our imaginations create additional difficulties for us.

Werther was my first prose experience of the almighty Goethe, but it is a young man’s work, and I am glad I have finished it and can move on to something else. I am certain that better things await, if not in volume 6, then in one of the others! So, dear reader, know that the battle with Goethe has only just begun.

Readers, should you have read more Goethe to me and had a better experience, or indeed had a better experience with Werther, do let me know in the comments.

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.