The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin – Summary and Analysis

“The Storyteller”, or “Die Erzähler”, is an essay, written in 1936, by the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, consisting on one level of a discussion of the stories of the little-known Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, and on another of Benjamin’s views on the division between stories and storytelling, and novels and writing. It is included in the collection of essays entitled Illuminations, which I’ve been reading in the past weeks, but I had been meaning to have a look at this particular essay for much longer, since I had guessed already that its contents would appeal to me. Though Benjamin is a challenging thinker and I doubtless missed things here and there, still I want to share what I got out of the piece. Here is a summary of its main points.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish critic and philosopher who took his own life after encountering difficulties fleeing the advancing armies of Nazi Germany.

The Death of Experience and the Death of Stories

Benjamin begins by making us consider what exactly a storyteller is. Though the name is surely familiar, they are almost entirely confined to the past. In the modern day, for various reasons, the craft – and it is a craft – of telling stories, is dying out. We may see the “great, simple outlines which define the storyteller”, but we cannot find them among our number anymore. The main reason for this is that experience, which is the source of all stories, has fallen in value and is no longer used. As to why, Benjamin suggests three potential causes.

The first of them is that society is, in its industrialised state, changing so rapidly that experience from the past no longer can have much effect upon the present. He finds examples of this in the horrors of his time: one’s experience of the economy becomes useless against the unprecedented nature of hyperinflation. One’s knowledge of war and battle is deemed useless in the face of new military technologies like the tank and mounted warfare. A related cause is the consequence of the first World War: “was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience”. As a result of the truly awful things they have seen in the early 20th century – overexperience, in a word – people no longer wish to talk about what a hundred years before might have made a ballad or a thousand years before an epic poem.

The third and final cause Benjamin gives special mention to: the rise of “information”. Information, Benjamin writes, “lays claim to prompt verifiability.” We have newspapers which will tell us not only what has happened, but why it has happened, regardless of where in the world it took place. In the past, intelligence and experience that came from afar was valued, even if it could never be verified that a traveller spoke the truth. But now, through the ubiquity of the “why” in the form of news, we no longer care for the experience of others. Information, however, “proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling”, and since we are so surrounded by it, it can be hard to escape the idea that an informational understanding of the world is the only and best way to understand it. A further problem with information is the way that it is intimately connected to its own time: “the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new.” As time passes, news becomes out of date, explanations for events are improved, and the newspaper becomes good for nothing except scrap paper.

The Origin of the Storyteller

But Benjamin is not aiming to be depressing, at least not entirely. He sees a beauty in the story and he wants to share that with us, even as it breathes its last. Storytelling, as has become something of a commonplace, is something ancient, deeply rooted inside us. Benjamin concludes the essay by calling the storyteller a craftsman – they take raw experience from themselves and from others and make solid, useful, and unique works from it. And the best storytellers, for him, are those whose work has the quality of being little different from the speech of unnamed multitudes of storytellers. That is, those who seem to belong to a whole greater than themselves. He sees part of the success of the growth of the story in the structures of earlier societies. There were two people who gained a lot of experience: those who spent much time in the same place, such as master craftsmen; and those who travelled a great deal and saw much of the world, albeit in less detail, such as journeymen. For Benjamin, the cross-pollination of these two groups, such as in a blacksmith’s home, lead to the exceedingly fruitful combination of “deep” experience with “wide” experience. Storytellers, the essay notes, are often interested in practical matters, and Benjamin makes the point that the best of them are also “rooted in the people”, with jobs that fully immerse them into life itself, such as being soldiers, sailors, or other manual workers.

Stories: Wisdom and Advice

But what exactly is a story? What are these mysterious things that the storytellers tell? Well, to begin with, every real story has “openly or covertly, something useful” hidden within it. “A moral… some practical advice… a proverb or a maxim”, whatever the case, the story has “Rat” within it – some advice, or counsel. This is not surprising – if the storyteller lives among the people and works among them too, then naturally what they want to do is help them using their experience. There is more to them than that, but Benjamin already hears criticism of this idea of stories. It’s awfully old fashioned to want a moral, to want some kind of advice, out of the things we hear or read. But Benjamin doesn’t see the problem in the stories themselves, but rather in a society which, due to its ever-growing specialisation, has meant that “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” What an accountant might be able to say usefully to a cleaner at a hotel nowadays is far less than, two hundred years ago, two similar such people might be able to share with each other. Barriers have arisen between us. This has the knock-on effect of disarming wisdom too, which is “Rat” “woven into the fabric of real life”. What use could be the use of the wisdom of a banker, unless we want to be a banker? Consciously, or unconsciously, we devalue the wisdom of others more and more and instead rely upon that upstart known as information. Another reason for wisdom’s death is that instead of using experience for finding our “truth”, we also increasingly use bigger narratives, such as ideologies, cutting out the human element entirely.

“The Storyteller” is included in the collection Illuminations, pictured here, alongside other famous works of Benjamin’s, like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.

Stories: Novels and Isolation

Nowadays we still come across what can be called “a story” within novels and other works of written art, but we no longer see “stories”. The novel rose in prominence as the story declined. Benjamin sees novels as completely separate from stories because it is completely “dependent on the book”. “It neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it.” Think about the last serious novel you read, and then think about the times you spoke about it with others. Rarely does the story itself assume prominence in these kinds of discussions anymore. Literary criticism is partially to blame for this, but whatever the reason, the plot takes a back seat to forces like form, style, and genre. Novels have their value, of course, in Benjamin’s eyes, but that value is one disconnected from the value of stories. Novels for him show the confusion of life, but they do not and cannot be vehicles for the dissemination of wisdom – the instant they do there are cries of “moralising”, “preachy”, and all sorts of other insults.

Another difference between the novelist and their work and the storyteller and their own is to do with their relationship to their readers and listeners. Born out of social interactions and experience, a storyteller is a social animal, and so is their work. I tell you a story, and you are in dialogue with me, able to ask questions, and challenge things. More importantly still, my stories are a mixture of my own experiences and those of others, and when I tell you my story, you have a new story for yourself – storytelling involves connection and giving. Even if written down a story still creates a copy of itself in your head in a way that a novel, for Benjamin, does not. By contrast, the novelist is isolated, creating alone, for a reader who may not even exist. He is “no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others”. He doesn’t have any advice to give because his experiences cannot create stories. There is a sense of great loneliness implied here. Benjamin has in mind here, I think, those truly huge and serious novels, works like Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, which deal with such great philosophical and theological concerns, but are all ultimately the product of too much thinking, rather than too much experience. A story about the same topics of faith and God, one imagines, would be simply tell of a man or woman pacing up and down in a wood-panelled room and raging against their mind and the world it contains. Not exactly a good story, in short. The practical nature of the storyteller’s life means that their stories are also practical in theme and advice.

A good and simple way of comparing the division between stories and novels is this: consider the contrast between our two phrases “the moral of the story” and “the meaning of life.” A story has its moral and answer, whereas a novel merely searches for an answer to that undoubtedly greater but certainly also more abstract question of “what is it we must do?”.

Stories: Ambiguity

Benjamin relates a story told by Herodotus. King Psammenitus of Egypt, defeated in battle and enslaved, sees his son go by to be executed without any outward show of emotion. Next he sees his daughter go by as a maid. But when finally he sees one of his old servants go by as a prisoner he starts crying and falls into the deepest mourning. Herodotus does not explain why. The story illustrates the next key idea of stories – their ambiguity. When I read Benjamin’s description of the incident, I thought initially that the king was crying because he suddenly realised that all previous social ranks had been abolished, and he was no different to one of his servants in status. Yet another, equally valid suggestion that Benjamin puts forward is that the king was restraining his grief, and seeing the old servant is the feather that finally made the dam of his sorrows burst. We have no way of knowing who of us is right, or whether the explanation is yet another one.

Stories are marked by their ambiguity. Unlike the novel, coming from an age of information, which tries to explain everything through psychological detail, stories do not try to explain things. “The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy”, but there are no attempts to offer up a “why” for them. Our own imaginations are left with that task. Information demands an attempt to offer a why, which also means it is bound to what is scientific, verifiable. On the other hand, stories can use any manner of fantastic ideas or miracles, because they are not defined by the pursuit of a “why” or a scientific idea of “truth”. You can tell a story again and again, and each time, depending on one’s mood, one’s station in life, one’s age, you will get a different reaction to it. But information is always the same – the work of imagining is impotent before facts and their explanations. Stories “resemble the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day”: each time they are told, they create a new version of themselves, a new experience, within us. Whereas a novel is doomed to being dated – its psychological framework always bears the brand of its own age.

Stories: Memory, Boredom, and Endings

Stories are told for plenty of reasons. Ambiguity is one of them, because it means a retelling is never in vain. They are also told because of boredom. Benjamin writes that “boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”. Through boredom we are receptive to stories, but not only in the sense that we are willing to listen to them – we are also willing to remember them. For remembering, and then retelling, stories is key to the art of storytelling, “and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained”. Unfortunately, Benjamin sees our age as one without the sort of boredom we need for stories. There are many of us who get bored – children especially complain of it. But nowadays we hardly ever live in such a state for long. Phones, games, and videos all provide a rapid escape from that tiresome emotion. But they also provide an escape from the possibility of telling stories, of passing the time through conversation and company. Given this environment of boredom, Benjamin adds that stories end with the sense that they can always be picked up and carried on. Novels, however, end without the same kind of feeling that they can just be continued. A novel, once it has ended upon a sufficiently good revelation about the meaning of life, stops and digs its heels in. Again, this is also a formal thing – a speaker can carry on, but a novel always arrives as a finished article.

Stories: the “transparent layers”

Benjamin is critical of the short story too, which is due to its intimate connection to the novel, but the shorter work has the added problem of struggling to deal with the larger thematic concerns that novels excel at. So, it occupies an awkward artistic position of failing to be either story or novel and thus flounders. In the case of a story, the “how” of its creation is important. Each storyteller will give their account of how they heard the tale, and in this way “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”. Short stories, though they can approximate this with certain frame narrative structures, nonetheless prove themselves storytelling “abbreviated”. They have lost their connection to the oral tradition, and also no longer permit “that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings”. By cutting out the middleman – the storyteller – a short story also cuts out the power and mystery that a history of retellings brings to a story. By doing so they also lose the “chain of tradition”, that a real story has. A short story, no matter how good, no longer reaffirms our connection to our roots.

Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) is not one of the most famous Russian authors here in the West. No doubt a part of this is due to the fact that his stories rarely conform to the more acceptable bourgeois forms like novels

Leskov and the Rest

So, where does Nikolai Leskov fit in to all this? The Russian is a modern-day storyteller for Benjamin, though his dates (1831-1895) mean he had been long dead even by the time that our author put pen to paper. Leskov was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and throughout his life had worked various odd jobs around the country, most successfully for an English firm which paid him to travel all around Russia on behalf of its leaders. Because of this, Leskov had the wealth of experience needed to give his work a story-like quality. He wrote novels, but more often shorter stories and novellas, all of them incorporating the ideas of story-ness that Benjamin highlights above. His most famous story, at least in the English-speaking world, is “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, and Benjamin also singles out stories such as “The Deception” and “The White Eagle”. Leskov is not the only storyteller who Benjamin names, though he is the focus. Among the others are Kipling, Poe, and Johann Peter Hebel. I might add Joseph Conrad, whose tales of the sea often also display the characteristics of stories.

Conclusion: Against the System

Even today, Benjamin writes, do people still pay attention to the words of a dying man or woman. In dying we have the same power, place the same demands of silence and thought and memory, as did the storyteller long ago. The story is not dead, but from my own experience it is certainly dying out in our time. I remember rare evenings, long ago, walking back from a long run with friends in the dark and fog of a November night, trying desperately to find some kind of ghost story worth telling, and being unable to. Only one us knew one, which they heard one from someone else. But that story remains with me, buried in my memory, unlike so many carcasses of novels and short stories. We oughtn’t let stories disappear from our lives without a fight. For stories, as Benjamin hints at, allow us to escape the systems that dominate our lives, most notably capitalism itself. They allow us into a carefree existence of laziness, boredom, and relaxation, safe from deadlines and reckoning up of bank accounts. They also, unlike novels, draw us closer to other people. Novels, formed by the bourgeois and capitalist system of their origin, can never truly escape it. Telling stories, meanwhile, is a permanent act of rebellion, an assertion of our freedom and the value of our experience against a world that tries to tell us we are nothing unless we add to information. Stories are the deepest, and greatest, treasure we have.  

If all this has inspired you to take a look at Leskov for yourself, my translation of “A Righteous Man” is located here.

Alternatively, for another recent writer who has carried on the tradition of ambiguous storytelling, my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Before the Law”, can be found here.

Translation: “I Just Couldn’t Help Myself” by Leo Tolstoy

This is my first attempt at translating a complete prose piece longer than a page. It is a story by the later Tolstoy, “Nechayanno”, detailing and comparing two moments in the lives of two separate families living in a single building. For classes in my first year at uni I had to do some translation, but it was never complete texts. Anyway, since my work was always rushed out either for deadlines or the exam itself, I never had a chance to truly take care over the translation and editing. Which isn’t to say that this is perfect, but at least that I’ve put some time and effort into it. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find an English translation anywhere online, but the original can be read here: https://rvb.ru/tolstoy/01text/vol_14/01text/0317.htm

Have a read of my translation and let me know what you think in the comments. My comments on the challenges of the process of bringing the story into English, and on the text itself, are underneath.

I just couldn’t help myself, Chance, Bad luck, An Accident, Misfortune[1]

He returned after five in the morning and went through, as was his custom, into his dressing room. But instead of getting undressed he sat – collapsed – into his armchair, with his arms falling upon his knees. He sat there like that, completely motionlessly, maybe for five minutes, maybe ten, or maybe for a whole hour – he didn’t know.

The seven of hearts – just like that he was crushed! – and he saw in the mirror his terrible, unshaking face, which somehow still shined with self-satisfaction.

“Oh, devil take them all!” He said loudly.

There was a rustling behind the door. Then his wife, a beautiful and energetic brunette with sparkling eyes, entered in her nightcap and dressing gown with a broach on it and felt green slippers.

 “What’s happened?” She said plainly. But when she saw his face, she cried out again. “What’s happened? Misha! What’s happened?”

“What’s happened is, well, that I’ve fallen again.”

“You were gambling?”

“Yes.”

“Well, and so what?”

“So what?” He looked at her with a mixture of pleasure and malice[2] and carried on: “I have fallen, I’m dead! It’s all over.” And he gave a sob, trying to hold back his tears.

“Just how many times have I asked? Have I begged?”

She pitied him, but she pitied herself still more. Both because she knew there would be privations to put up with, and because she herself hadn’t slept all night, tormented by terrible thoughts as she waited for him. “It’s already five in the morning.” She thought, glancing at the clock upon the sideboard. – Well, you torturer, how much?”

He waved both of his hands around his head.

“All of it! No, not all of it, but more than that: everything I own, everything to my name. Go on and hit me for it. Do whatever you want to me. I’m dead now,” And he hid his face with his hands. “And I don’t know anything else!”

“Misha, Misha, listen to me for a moment. Pity me too – I’m a person just like you, and I didn’t sleep all night long. I waited for you, worked myself up with anxiety, and this is my reward. At least tell me what it was. How much?”

“So much that I can’t… that nobody can pay it. All sixteen thousand. Everything is over. I have to flee, but how…?”

He looked at her, and though he expected nothing of her at all, she drew him to herself. “How good she is.” He thought, and he took her by the hand. But as soon as he did she pushed him away.

“Misha, well, tell me the truth, how could you do this?”

“I wanted to win it all back…” He took out a cigar and greedily started to smoke. “Yes, of course… I am a bastard, I don’t deserve you. Get rid of me. Forgive me a final time, and I will go away – I’ll disappear. Katya, I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t. It was like I was dreaming, and then I just couldn’t help myself.” He started to squint. “But what can I do now? I’m already dead. But please forgive me, you at least.” And once more he tried to embrace her, but she angrily drew away from him.

“God, these pitiful men. They try to look all brave while things are going well, but the moment things take a turn for the worse it’s depression and uselessness all the way.”

She sat down on the other side of his washing table.

“Tell me how it happened.”

And he told her. He told her how he was taking his money to the bank and bumped into Nekrasov. Nekrasov suggested they go back to his and have a game. And they played, and he lost, and now he had decided to put an end to everything and himself too. He said that he had decided to put an end to everything, but she saw that in fact he had decided nothing, and was deeply depressed and ready to do anything.

She listened to him and, when he had finished, said: “All this is stupid, disgusting: how could you fail to stop yourself? This is cretinism, pure and simple.”

“Swear at me, do whatever you want to me.”

“Well, I don’t want to swear. I want to save you, just I have always saved you, no matter how disgusting and pitiful you’ve seemed to me.”

“Go on, go on. You’ve barely gotten started with the insults.”

“Look here, listen. Do you have any idea how base you are? How mercilessly you torment me? I am ill… Today I was taking even more of the stuff… and now this “surprise”. How powerless I feel.  And you say, what do we do? It’s very simple what we do. Right at this very moment – it’s six o’clock – go to Frim and tell him about it.”

“Will Frim really give a damn? I can’t tell him.”

“Oh, how stupid you are sometimes. Do you really think that I’m suggesting you tell the director of the bank that you lost the money they gave you – on trust! – in a game of cards? Tell him that you went to Nikolaevskii Station… No… it’s better go to the police right away. Wait a minute… not now, but in the morning at ten o’clock. You were going along Nechaevskii Lane when two people attacked you. One had a beard, the other was almost a boy. One was with a Browning and they took your money. After the police you need to go immediately Frim and say exactly the same thing.”

“Yes, but after all…” And he lit up a cigarette now. “What if they learned the truth from Nekrasov himself?”

“I will go to Nekrasov. I will tell him what’s happening. I’ll get it done.”

Misha began to calm down, and when it was 8 o’clock he fell asleep like a dead man. And then at ten she woke him.

…

This all happened early in the morning on the upper floor. And on the lower one, in the home of the Ostrovskys, at eight in the evening the following took place.

They had only just finished dinner. The young mother, princess Ostrovskaya, called over a servant, who had already served them all of the orange-jelly pie[3], and asked for a clean plate and, having placed on it a portion of the jelly, she turned to her children. There were two of them: the elder was a boy of seven, Voka, and the younger was a girl of four and a half, Tanya[4]. Both of them were very beautiful children. Voka was a serious, healthy and quiet boy with a charming smile which proudly presented his uneven, jumbled teeth; Tanya was a dark-eyed, talkative, quick and energetic little joker who always entertained with her constant cheeriness and affection towards everyone.

“Now, my dears, who will bring the pie to nanny?”

“I will,” Pronounced Voka.

“Me, me, me, me, me, me!” Started to cry out Tanya, racing down from her seat.

“No – who spoke first? Voka. Here, take it,” Said the father, who was always spoiling Tanya and for that reason was always glad for a reason to rectify the balance. “And you, Tanya,” He said to his favourite, “Let your brother have his turn.”

“I’m always glad to let Voka go. Go on, Voka, take it. I don’t mind giving him the chance.” Usually the children said their thanks after dinner. The parents drank their coffee and awaited the return of Voka. But for some reason he hadn’t come back.

“Tanya, run off into the children’s room and see why Voka hasn’t returned.”

Tanya jumped off her seat, brushing against her spoon and knocking it onto the floor. She picked it up and laid it on the edge of the table, where it soon fell again. She was dying of laughter as she picked it up once more, getting her leggings all messed up, then she flew into the corridor and then to the children’s room, at the far end of which there was the door to their nanny’s bedroom. She would have rushed through the children’s room, but suddenly she heard the sounds of sobbing behind her. She looked round. Voka was standing near his bed and, looking at the rocking horse, he carried the plate in his hands as he cried bitterly. On the plate there was not a crumb left.

“Voka, what’s up? Voka, what’s happened to the pie?”

“I… I… I… ate it as I walked. I just couldn’t help myself. I’m not going… anywhere… I’m not going. Tanya, I… really, it was an accident… I ate it all… at the beginning just a little, then all of it.”

“Well, what are we to do?”

“I just couldn’t help myself…”

Tanya fell into deep thought, while Voka burst into tears and wept. Suddenly everything became clear to her.

“Voka, here’s what we’ll do. You stop crying and go instead to nanny and tell her that you, without meaning to… well and say sorry too… and tomorrow we’ll give her both of our slices. She’s kind and will understand.”

Voka’s sobbing stopped, and he wiped away his tears with both his palm and the back of his hand.

“But how do I say it?” He said with a trembling voice.

“Well, let’s go in together.”

And they went, and when they returned they were happy and cheery. And happy and cheery, too, were their nanny and parents, when the nanny, laughing and touched, told them the whole story.

A little bit about the translation

I chose Tolstoy as the first person to translate because, contrary to the size of his reputation, he’s actually a very easy writer to understand for a Russian learner. His sentences are perfectly formed, if long (I had to cut down a number of them here, and rearrange still others), and his vocabulary is rarely exceedingly complex.  Anna Karenina was for me, even though it was in Russian, a literal page turner. His style is fantastic because its virtuosity is in never getting in the way of the story yet at the same time managing to heighten every moment of it. Other great writers are great because of their content; many are great for their style; but to me Tolstoy is one of the best examples of a writer who synthesises style and content in the 19th century, before content moved predominantly into the characters themselves, and style had to morph to cope.

Other than Tolstoy, I might have done some Chekhov or Turgenev, both of whom are also good at writing well. Dostoevsky, who is my favourite Russian prose writer, is nonetheless pretty awful at writing, and I am not comfortable trying to translate him just yet. Writers of the 20th Century I find more challenging to read and translate not only because they tend to be more introspective, but also because their works tend to be more cluttered with realia, and my vocab isn’t quite up to it. Furthermore, there is the danger of copyright, which stops me from translating someone like Ivan Bunin until I’ve read all of the rules properly.

In the footnotes I commented on a few things that were tricky. Really the hardest thing is making something that sounds good in English. I made the translation last week, and then came back once I’d had a break so that I could edit it with fresh eyes. Sentences need to be cut, words need to be shifted around. And all the time I feel conscious of every little change I make as though it’s a sin before the great old man and his craft. I did my best though, and for a first attempt, I hope it sounds alright.

An image of Tolstoy.
The old master himself. Yet most of the fiction he is famous for was written when he was much younger.

A Few Words of Analysis

The story comes from the late Tolstoy. What that means is that it comes from a man now deeply concerned about the moral issues of his time, and about education. Both of these come from a religious conversation that took place as he was finishing Anna Karenina and left him a deeply devout radical Christian. Art, suddenly, had to have a clear message, and the two-part structure of the story is one way in which he, relatively painlessly for once, hints at this message he wants to convey. But what is the message? It’s best to take a look at each part in turn.

The first part details the return home of Misha after a night spent gambling. Gambling always seems to play a big role in Russian fiction of the 19th Century, and it famously inspired and in some cases forced the creation of some of Dostoevsky’s best fiction. Tolstoy himself squandered his entire inheritance on gambling while he was in the military, so he too knew a thing or two about it. Misha is a man in crisis. He has no direction in life without his money, and can think only of fleeing his guilt. This isn’t even the first time, but now the mistakes have piled up too high. He refers to himself as a dead man, and there is an undercurrent of suicidal thought throughout his thoughts and words.

At first his wife seems like a good character to his bad one. She arrives, she disapproves, but she forgives him, in a way, and tries to help. But her help is only more deceit and danger – it is lying to the bank, and making up a story about thieves. Though she loves him, what she proposes is not a good resolution to the problem. It is trying to make a right with two wrongs.

There are a number of indications that both husband and wife are to be disapproved of here, some of them ridiculous and Tolstoyan, while others are a little more sensible. Gambling, of course, is a sin, and for that Misha has done badly. He lives without faith, so he doesn’t know what to do with himself now that he’s in trouble. He smokes too – one of Tolstoy’s greatest demands of himself when he became seriously Christian was that he quit the habit. His wife is ill and taking medicine without success. Anna Karenina, once she had fallen in the eyes of society (and Tolstoy), also developed an illness that required medication. What Tolstoy wants to show by this, however, is that medicine will never be enough to help someone who is morally fallen, as both of the characters here are. They need faith.

The second part, detailing a minor incident in the life of an aristocratic family, is shorter, and in a way simpler. It mirrors the first in that like the first part it focuses on a man in a state of despair being found by a woman who proposes a solution. Like Misha, Voka makes a mistake when he eats the pie intended for his nanny, and like Misha he suffers for his guilt. Yet there is a key difference between the two incidents, and it is not one of scale, but rather of response. Voka is found by Tanya in a state of despair, and she suggests to him a way of dealing with the problem. They will tell the truth, and try to make amends by giving away their pie tomorrow. Unlike Misha and his wife, who try to save themselves by telling lies, and hoping to avoid the consequences, here Voka accepts his punishment and atones for it.

Unlike with the first part, where we can only guess at the result of the lie, here we know what happens to the children. The adults laugh about their story and are touched – they forgive them. In short, Tolstoy seems to suggest that telling the truth is the best course of action, and the mark of a happy and morally healthy family. (It’s noticeable, also, that in the first part there is no indication that the couple have children.)

There is more to it than that, and more angles to come at it from, but that’s what I’m taking away from it. As always, the thing that I do think is absolutely amazing with Tolstoy is the way that I feel I could carry the story on in my head. These characters, sketched out in a few scant paragraphs, already seem real, living beings to me, independent of the text that contains them. Nobody else does it as well as him. It’s a funny little story, overall, with much more to say than its small size would seem to indicate. We don’t always have control over our actions, but we always have control over how we deal with their consequences. It makes us reflect on that, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

Let me know what you think of the translation, or of the story, below.

[1] The Russian word “Nechayanno”/Нечаянно can usually be translated simply as “unintentionally”. It is related to the word “чуять”, which means “to scent”, in that both of them are related to sensing. Nechayanno means without being fully conscious, then. I initially wanted something like “by accident” or “a mistake” to be the title, but as will become clear, the word is used in different ways in the story, and no single English word would have been adequate. Hence the phrase.

[2] The Russian word “Zloradstvo” doesn’t have a single word equivalent, funnily enough. It combines both Evil “Zlo” and gladness “Rad”

[3] Food is always hard to translate, since there is often both a cultural barrier and a historical one to overcome.

[4] Tanechka, actually, on account of her diminutive size. I decided to keep the name more familiar in an English context. I have not been able to find out where in the world the name Voka comes from. Rather confusingly, if not also amusingly, most attempts to write вока in Google just lead to information about woks.



Varlam Shalamov and the Secrets of the Gulag

There are as many different attitudes towards the author as there are readers, or at the very least, as there are critics. Some people can’t stand it when a writer intervenes to let us know that a given act was moral or immoral, or to preach a little bit upon a topic close to their heart. But others can’t wait for the author to materialise, as though reading is more about having a self-help guru and guide than a place to go to get away. Intervention usually takes us out of the story, because even if the ‘wise’ words come from a character, often it’s easy to see the way they seem to stand up straighter, possessed as they suddenly are by the ghost of their writer’s convictions. In many cases, our attitude towards this all depends as much on the author in question as on everything else. When it comes to the Russians many of us are happy to sit through one of Dostoevsky’s sermons to get to the action on the other side, whereas when Tolstoy starts telling us what’s what in the study of history in the epilogue of War and Peace, most people throw the book across the room.

The more serious the subject matter, the more we expect authorial intervention, as though experience and suffering and the thematic ambition of a work has somehow entitled the writer to preach upon the topic with authority. It makes sense – the more serious the questions that the work is raising or attempting to solve – the more important the opinion of the author will be to them, and the greater will be their desire to share it with us. It is precisely the lack of all this in the Kolyma Tales that comes as such a relief. Here, the seriousness of the subject matter – life in the Gulag at the height of Stalinism – is accompanied instead by a seriousness of authorial silence. Brutality, cruelty, fear, and death pass with nary a comment, so that the silence of the work becomes as much a statement as any tract, and the reader is left to decide for themselves what, if anything, there is to take away from all this.

Kmusser [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons
The Kolyma Basin. The camps were scattered around the region and the evidence for them was in many cases destroyed, making it hard to know where Shalamov himself was imprisoned.

Here is my review of Kolymskie Rasskazi, or the Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov. I have to say I am absolutely in awe of these little stories, most of which are only a few pages long. Though I have been to the Gulag Museum in Moscow, (and thoroughly recommend it), Shalamov himself was imprisoned in the zone for fifteen whole years! Some of his sentences were for crimes as petty as suggesting that the first Russian Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Bunin, was actually pretty good – as a noble who departed after the Revolution, Bunin was very much unacceptable within the USSR in either spirit or person. For much of this time Shalamov was made to work at the Gulag camps in Kolyma, a region in the far North East of Russia to the north of the sea of Okhotsk. Apart from gold and other metals, the area is a sparsely populated wasteland, where nature is as much of an enemy as one’s fellow man. And it was to here, in the height of Stalin’s power and paranoia, that many prisoners were sent, their duty being the harvesting of resources, whatever the cost. In such a place, a life loses its value. Yet Shalamov survived all this, managing to return home when his sentence was done and pass away, aged 74, in 1982. He published some poetry while alive, but as for his prose none of these tales were published within the USSR during his lifetime – they went too far, their implied criticism of the regime’s actions went too deep. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who ultimately had contacts who could help him in getting his works out, Shalamov shunned acquaintances who could be of use to him, including Solzhenitsyn himself. After the camps he wasn’t exactly one for trusting.

These stories, both fiction and non-fiction and almost impossible to tell between the two, are his record of that life. They are written in a style reminiscent of Chekhov. The narrator describes the build up to an event, its climax, and then the story ends without any kind of moral tying together of its strands. The reader is left entirely to come to their own conclusions. The style is matter-of-fact, unadorned with much by way of metaphor. The only colour comes from the occasional descriptions of the barren but simultaneously strikingly beautiful nature, and the “fenia”, or prison slang, of the convicts. I’ve been reading the translation by Donald Rayfield for the moment, but I will be going back and rereading in the original in the coming weeks, and not only because I’ll be writing essays on it.

The first story, “Trampling the snow” in Rayfield’s translation, “Po Snegu” in the original, describes the process of creating a road through the snow by the prisoners. It is barely more than a page long, and describes a process rather than a single event as do most of the other stories, but there is much here that prefigures the rest of the work. The warfare between man – and here it is a man’s world only – and nature, is indicated first by the sentence: “Roads are always made on calm days, so that human labor is not swept away by wind”. But here also are hints of the state that humanity is reduced to – in both the original and the translation, the word “human” is a mere adjective describing their work. It hints, I think, subtly at the fact that human lives are secondary here to their productivity, at least in the eyes of the camp organisers. At the end of the first paragraph there is also a description of a man who “steers his body through the snow like a helmsman steering a boat along a river, from one bend to the next”. It is a striking image because of the sheer dislocation between mind and body that it implies – all the result of the degrading conditions of the camp.  

Throughout the stories there are attempts to show how it is that people survive so far away from comfort and safety. Solzhenitsyn liked to stress the redemptive power of manual work, but Shalamov had no such convictions. At the end of “trampling the snow” we find that every member of a group must bear responsibility for setting down part of the trail, no matter their physical state – the implications of this only becomes fully clear once the descriptions of starvation and suffering pile up as the stories run on. There is little kindness or communal spirit, no sense of lightening the load for others if it is within our power. In “Condensed Milk” the narrator receives two whole tins filled with condensed milk and eats them with a large audience, but doesn’t think of sharing. In “Field rations” the he comments that nobody can have friends out here. Instead, prisoners are shown to be extremely resourceful as individuals. “On the Slate” describes the skills by which they assemble a pack of cards from paper, bread reduced to starch, and indelible pencil.

In the introduction to Rayfield’s translation there is added a small note by Shalamov, not intended for publication, called “What I Saw and Understood in the Camps.”. It contains in essence all of his “truths” that he dramatizes and demonstrates over the course of the collection. Here are a number of examples from it: “I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions”. “The main means for depraving the soul is the cold”. “I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal”. “I understood why people do not live on hope – there isn’t any hope… They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal”. By some accounts, the number killed in Kolyma alone was close to 3 million. Simply from the tone of his words, you can tell, I think, just how hard it was to live there. Food and warmth are the only things that seem to have any value at all – after all, they are all one needs to keep going.

This is the sort of wasteland that “Field Rations” takes place in.

“Field Rations” is probably among the heaviest stories that I’ve read in the book, and my favourite. The narrator and three other men are sent to create a clearing in the forest at a place called Duskania spring. They were expected to be there for ten days, and had been given, as a result, some rations. For them, after being in a constant state of starvation, the amount of food they suddenly had is breath-taking. “Rations meant to last ten days looked intimidating”, the narrator says. There is responsibility in food. And the men are starving. The narrator writes that “any human feelings – love, friendship, envy, charity, mercy, ambition, decency – had vanished along with the flesh we had lost during our prolonged starvation”, so that all that remains is “resentful anger, the most lasting of human feelings”. This fact, that anger trumps all else, is another one of Shalamov’s key ideas. The narrator continues describing the state of mind that people in the camps find themselves in, with death never far off. “We realized that death was no worse than life and we were afraid of neither. We were in thrall to total indifference.” Dehumanization comes not through insults and beatings, but simply through starvation and an atmosphere which says life doesn’t matter. Suicide, a word not spoken directly, but rather in a round-about way, is said to be stopped merely by “some trivial thing that was part of life”, like a slightly bigger portion in the mess hall. Here in the wilderness nature and its continued struggling to carry on becomes an example to the men. They are in awe of the trees, which manage to survive in the far north. Trees that die lying down, just like them. The narrator then describes his fellow workers in the clearing, as they get ready to eat their evening meal – who they are, and why they are here. One person was in the camps on the basis simply of letters to their fiancée – but Shalamov doesn’t dwell on questions of whether this is valid justification. That is the reader’s job. In much the same way, Stalin is only mentioned once in the whole collection – in a description of his portrait.

After a few days a guard arrives with additional supplies for them, but he warns them that their work is insufficient for them to be able to stay in the clearing, a heavy blow because here the work is easier than back at the camp. He says that they have only done ten per cent of the norm. A few days later a sergeant comes and confirms that they should return to the camp the next morning. Perhaps as a result of that during the night one of the men hangs themselves. The narrator and one of the others strip him of what they can get, but the third remaining man grabs an axe and uses it to hack his own fingers off in delirium, to save himself from working. The story ends with the narrator back at the camp, where he mentions simply that the third man is now being prosecuted for malicious self-harm.

This kind of ending is pretty typical of Shalamov. Death happens in a matter of fact way that is startling and leaves you feeling uneasy, and nothing seems to end well. A good ending here is simply an ending where nothing changes. But this story is enjoyable, and probably the best introduction to Shalamov’s writing that I’ve yet read. It has his ideas of human nature, it has a build up and climax, it has some characters and their interactions, and finally it has a sense of adventure and nature. It sounds bad, but these stories are a sort of escapism, a sort of fodder for the imagination, of the sort that science fiction is to many others. Shalamov’s world is so far removed from our own, but it is beautiful at times too – we are made to acknowledge the beauty of survival – and because Shalamov is writing from experience, everything seems to acquire an extra layer of clarity. Images seem sharper in my own head. It is exciting. But there are problems inherent in this too. Shalamov doesn’t just write about his own experience. “Cherry Brandy”, describing the death of the poet Osip Mandel’shtam, feels immediately less engaging by contrast to the majority of the other stories precisely because we are aware that Shalamov is describing something neither he nor anyone else knows the truth of. A commitment to an autobiographical style is also, accidentally even, a concomitant devaluation of non autobiographical descriptions within the confines of the same work. At least, it seemed so to me.

With their short lengths, these stories seem consciously designed to be snapshots of a world, instead of its encompassing it, as is the case with Solzhenitsyn’s gigantic tomes. They are, in a sense, humble, and aware of their own limitations. But I cannot stress enough how exciting they are too – in Shalamov’s writings we are thrown into a world where we do not know what could possibly happen next because the experience of the GULAG is so far away from our own lives, not just geographically, but also morally and socially. And though they are depressing and leaden with pessimism, at the same time these stories showcase the human will to survive, whatever the conditions, and whatever the cost. They set our imagination alight with just what we are capable of. So have a read – they’re short so there’s scarcely a commitment – and see what you think yourselves.

Another interesting Soviet writer is Andrei Platonov. Unlike Shalamov he was never imprisoned, but his writings demonstrate a man very much on the edge where official approval becomes hostility. Check out my review of his Soul and Other Stories here

Picture of the Kolyma Basin by Kmusser [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons

Picture of Landscape in Kolyma byAnatoly V. Lozhkin (Northeast Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Branch) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons