Tag: Franz Kafka

The Lush Language of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew, wrote a few stories in the 1930s and then was killed by the Gestapo after Germany took over Poland. It is upon these few stories which his legacy rests. They are stories of a little village on the Austro-Hungarian borderlands, of a strange father and a stranger world, and are at times comedic, at times serious, at times deathly sad. What makes them special – for after all there are quite a few central-European writers bemoaning life in the provinces at that time – is the way that Schulz writes. His language is infused with a kind of imaginative intensity, and every image, sound, or thought, is described without a cliché in sight, so that they hang in the mind long after we have finished reading.

In his obsession with language and his life’s tragic trajectory, Schulz is not unlike Isaac Babel. In his treatment of strangeness and absurdity, he has something of Kafka about him (he translated The Trial into Polish). And in his interest in the imagination and spaces, forbidden and mysterious, he often reminded me of Borges. But as a writer, for better or worse, he is clearly unique, entirely himself.

Stories

The world that Schulz describes is seen through a child’s eyes and endowed with the full imaginative potential that each child brings to the world. The stories he tells are not plot-driven. Instead, they are closer to paintings – they make us drink our fill of a particular impression or mood. When things happen, it’s almost always an afterthought. Take the story “Birds”. The narrator’s father decides to house a hundred exotic birds in one room of their home after becoming interested in ornithology. When he needs still more entertainment, he decides to cross breed them, creating new and more bizarre specimens. In his obsession, the father begins to become bird-like himself. But one day the cleaner comes and throws the birds out. This is the essence of the story.

It lasts four or five pages. What sustains it is its language, more than the plot. A phrase like this – “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread” – is enough to make us stop, pause, wonder. The story also contains its fair share of ideas, but unlike say in the case of Musil, the language in Schulz seems more important than what it might be trying to say. There is a condor who urinates in the same chamber pot as the narrator’s father, an image that brings to mind a certain Austrian psychoanalyst. Then there is the matter of the father’s own ornithological transformation – a demonstration of how our obsessions take hold of us. The story ends, however, after the birds have been driven out, with the father coming downstairs – “A moment later, my father came downstairs – a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom”. The image is too ridiculous to be wholly serious, and this light-heartedness means that Schulz never gets too bogged-down in the cleverness of ideas.

Character

Character also goes some way to sustaining a cold, hard, plotless universe. In “August” we meet some of the narrator’s relatives. Here’s an example:

“Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair moustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.”

I love this description because of the trousers. It almost seems that they are more characterful than Emil himself. When Schulz applies his wondrous language to people, he can make truly memorable descriptions. Emil’s storytelling is described thus: “he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.”

Of an aging man, Uncle Charles, Schulz excellently conveys a kind of paranoia through his description of Charles’ environment: “The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.”

But the figure who is most striking is easily the narrator’s father. Unlike Kafka’s father, the father of Schulz’s story is a person more to be pitied than feared: “We heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders”. He is at one point compared to an Old Testament prophet, but in the act of throwing a chamber pot from a window, so that the comparison is just as embarrassing to us as it is to the narrator. At one point the father turns into a crab, at another he appears to be in the process of transforming into a cockroach. In a tragic reinterpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” the narrator, a child, begs his mother to tell him what has become of his father. She merely says that he is now a travelling salesman, and home rarely. But the truth is that like Gregor, he has become monstrous, a thing to be shunned. And this is not something that the narrator should discover. 

Imagination and Books

I wrote that Schulz shares with Borges a preoccupation with books and with magical spaces. In the longest story “Spring”, the narrator becomes engrossed in a stamp collection that comes to represent for him the key to understanding the world. In “The Book”, what appears to be an old catalogue is transfigured by the narrator’s nostalgia into being the source of all earthly joy. He looks everywhere for it, only to discover that the housemaid is using its pages for lighting fires. A paragraph like this, of which there are many similar examples, seems to make Schulz into a precursor to the great Argentine:

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of its being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently”.

Schulz here is exploring the way that objects can be transformed by attention, and how they might disclose hidden meanings. Borges’s world too, is filled with magical objects – daggers, alephs, and the like. But what differentiates Schulz from Borges is that Schulz has more heart. The near destruction of the book for starting fires is a disaster, rather than a development in a story of ideas. The narrator’s emotions are felt by us, even though we retain a certain ironic distance (after all, we know that with age the narrator will realise that a catalogue is just a catalogue, and really not worth getting so excited about).

Magic Spaces

Beyond books, Schulz uses the imagination to transform his provincial town’s world into something far greater. One of my favourite stories is “Cinnamon Shops”, which sees the narrator go on a walk late at evening:

“It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semi-obscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, makebelieve streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”

With Schulz we never know when the real world ends and when the magical one begins. The narrator visits his school, but finds it transformed now that it is dark. He enters spaces he has never been before. He feels a certain anxiety, which Schulz conveys perfectly through his language:

“The profound stillness of these empty rooms was filled with the secret glances exchanged by mirrors and the panic of friezes running high along the walls and disappearing into the stucco of the white ceilings.”

Awe and wonderment are what makes these descriptions so compelling. Schulz has a particular talent for describing the sky, which always succeeds in making it ominous, or joyous, or frightening, as he desires.

Conclusion

His was a small oeuvre, but there’s no denying Schulz’s talent, which is why there are few valid reasons for avoiding him. Nevertheless, he is a writer who is better sampled in sips than gulps. My girlfriend, who bought me the collection, asked me to read the tales aloud to her. This was the right approach. Slowed down by my voice, the language could reach me with its full melodious complexity. I could not rush to find some plot – I could only enjoy what I had in front of me.

Schulz is a master of words. Even if his ideas are not as gripping as some other writers, or his plots as exciting, still he draws us in. Language, at least in his hands, is far more important than ideas or plots are in those of other writers, because Schulz uses language to transform the world. He reveals possibilities for vivid description which are obscured by the layers of cliché we normally read in books, and in doing so frees us from looking on the world as something finished, already described. Thanks to him we can see it as something magical once again.

Burning to the Last – Sándor Márai’s Embers

Sándor Márai’s Embers is the second work of Hungarian literature that I’ve read after Satantango, but I’m not quite sure whether “Hungarian” is the best word for describing this short novel of ageing and decline. For though Embers was published in 1942, its attention is focused back towards the past, when Márai’s country (he was born in 1900) was Austria-Hungary and not the dislocated Hungary it became after the Treaty of Trianon. The sheer nostalgia for a Vienna that once was, for a life that once was, is unmistakable. Márai had even once considered writing in German instead of Hungarian, in the same way that Kafka, another citizen of an empire that disappeared, felt compelled to choose between Czech and German. They made different choices, but a common sensibility, a common heritage, ties them, and Hofmannsthal, and Rilke, and so many others, together. They were once all Austro-Hungarians.

Sándor Márai (1900-1989), only recently was “discovered” by the literary establishment, but his incorporation is in full swing. Embers is his most famous work, it seems.

The Plot of Embers

In the castle there lives an old general. The General (his name – Henrik – we learn later, but the sheer formality and seriousness by which he lives means that the text rarely refers to him by it) lives with his servants, chief among them Nini, a 91-year-old who once served as his nanny and wet nurse. He has lived, almost without any contact with the outside world, for many years. People come to his estate to hunt in the expansive grounds, but they stay in the hunting lodge and do not see the master. The general’s wife died young, and his only friend disappeared 41 years ago. His life is one of looking back. We are told early on that “he thought only in decades, anything more exact upset him, as if he might be reminded of things he would rather forget”.

But the things that we wish to forget are often the things that keep us going. The novel begins when the General’s peace is at last disrupted by a letter, informing him that this friend will be coming for dinner that evening. The scene is set for a walk through the past, an untangling of confused memories, and a working out of something akin to the truth. But when life is almost at its end it is precisely truth, hazy and unpredictable, that can be the most valuable thing in the world.

The original title of Embers, A gyertyák csonkig égnek, is literally translated as “Candles burn until the end”. And indeed, most of the story takes place by the fire, and each chapter mimics the slow decline of life as the red glow grows dim, before finally going out. At first the General and his friend deal with their common past in the military academy and service, both in dialogue and in reminiscences, but with time they move ever closer to the present, and to the questions that have been tormenting the General for all those years that they were parted. These questions, as he himself says, are perhaps what have been giving him the strength to stay alive all this time.

Male Friendship

It is a friendship that needs to be worked out. Konrad, the returning friend, tried – the General is sure of it – to kill the General on the day of a hunt, 41 years before the novel takes place. He tried to do this, perhaps, because of a secret relationship with the General’s wife. The day after the hunt Konrad disappeared and the General’s wife ceased talking with him. The General wants to understand what happened, and why, but as the one-sided interrogation is carried out by the fire – Konrad almost never speaks, even to defend himself – we get the strange feeling that the General is trying to save himself, just as much as he’s trying to save his friendship.

The novel is unusual in the focus it lays upon friendship, particularly male friendship. I can’t think of many other books that do so. Destructive forces, even love, always seem to take precedence over the banalities and subtleties of friendship when it comes to novels. No doubt because they’re much more dramatic. But friendship is an important topic, even if it’s one that is already in a way outdated in the way we encounter it in Embers. The two kids meet at a military academy, where they spend every day and night together. And though they have different backgrounds – Konrad is poor, while Henrik is wealthy – and share different worldviews – Henrik is martial and serious, while Konrad loves music – the friendship that springs up seems built to last forever.

The intensity of the arrangement is hard to understand for people who haven’t experienced something similar. I’m lucky, perhaps, in that I went to boarding school, and know the sort of thing Márai describes here. Of course, many of my friends were friends only through common experience, a weak bond; but for those friends who were friends for deeper reasons, the length of time we spent together means that even now, when we are all separated and scattered across the world, we remain close in a way that is hard to describe.

Friendship’s Decline

The General and his friend’s relationship is both the second sort, and not. Certainly, at first glance the friendship between the two of them seems to rely only on common experience. But that’s not true – there is a sense that they also have a shared internal world, which even though their interests are mismatched is nonetheless enough to bond them tightly. They make vows of chastity, and promise other monkish feats. The problem is that as time passes divisions between them grow, and what was once unimportant becomes unavoidable and painful.

Chief among these divisions is the problem of money. Though Konrad is at the prestigious military academy and a nobleman, he is there only because his parents are starving themselves for his sake. He says that whenever he spends money he is “expending a portion of their lives”, and though Henrik tries to understand this, their difference in backgrounds grows harder to bear. Henrik lacks the imagination for understanding – he is a military man. And once the two finish at the academy and start working, stationed near Vienna, their differing sensibilities become a further obstruction to understanding. Henrik goes carousing and lives the life of a young officer. Konrad, delicate and musical, cannot. And though he feigns indifference, “one could hear in his voice the need of a thirsty man yearning to drain life dry”. With time such feelings only get worse.

Music is also another point where the boys’ divisions are obvious. Henrik doesn’t understand music. He feels cut off from Konrad whenever the other listens. But for Konrad music is liberation: “When he listened to music, he listened with his whole body, as longingly as a condemned man in his cell aches for the sound of distant feet”. Music connects Konrad with Chopin, who is mentioned several times in the book as a figure of mixed identity, having a French father and Polish mother. Konrad and the General’s wife are both artistic and uncertain in their origins. Unsurprisingly, an affair forms, and it is for that reason that Konrad may have wanted to kill his friend.

End of an Era – Closed Spaces and the Politics of Embers

Embers takes place not long before its publication in 1942. But war is hard to hear through the castle’s walls. One thing I noticed early on is the use of space in the novel. The General’s world is one of closed spaces. He is out of touch with the times. In this he is very reminiscent of Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Just as Stevens (unknowingly) hides within Darlington Hall to avoid facing a world that has changed, so too does the General in the castle. He looks at portraits from the past and thinks of how good things were – “absolutely dedicated to honour, to the male virtues: silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word”. Yet he also keeps most of the castle closed down, unvisited, to avoid facing the memories locked within those rooms. And though he hunts, he never leaves the estate.

A castle from Hungary
A castle in Hungary. I liked Embers’ use of closed spaces to show both the isolation of the General, and his attempts to keep his homeland alive inside him. Photo by Puffancs CC BY-SA 2.5 HU

Like Stevens, he relies on silence to deceive himself. “Everything… had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence”. Even his friendship with Konrad is described as “hermetic”. For Henrik the Austro-Hungarian Empire has not ended because within his own person – in the values he chooses to embrace – he can keep it alive, and because within his castle he can believe it still is safe. As much as he wants answers from the past, it’s seems more to complete a picture of it than to change the present.

Konrad is almost the exact opposite of the General in all this. His music serves to break down barriers. Music, of course, is a universal language. It connects him first to the General’s mother, herself a Frenchwoman, and then to the General’s wife. Only the General and his father cannot understand it – their focus is on the physical, rather than the sublime. When Konrad disappeared, he moved to England, and from there to the tropics to serve in the Empire. He doesn’t seem to have any loyalty to his past country. But he has come back. The General says this is because their friendship has remained strong, even through the years of separation. That’s true. But it’s also true that Konrad is just as trouble as the General is by the past. In his case, by the failure of his relationship with the General’s wife.

For both men, the evening is a way of working out what happened – both are old, and both are ready for the peace that can only, perhaps, be attained by resolving a lasting uncertainty.

Conclusion

Embers is not a long novel. Forty-one years of separation take up little time if all that time is spent in waiting. But though it’s short, it’s densely and beautifully written – hence why I’ve tried to include plenty of quotes. The ideas of friendship, of trying to hold onto the past, are just as relevant today as they were when the book was written, and leave plenty of food for thought. If you can find yourself a copy, it’s well worth the short time it will take you to read it.

The conclusion to Embers is also especially worth pondering. If you’ve read the novel, please do leave a comment, as I’d like to see what others made of it.

The Siberian Dignity of Valentin Rasputin’s Money for Maria

Introduction: In Search of the Real Russia

Money for Maria is a novella by the late Soviet writer Valentin Rasputin. I came across him and his work quite by chance, as I generally prefer reading older writers. But come to him I did, because I’ve always been interested, as most foreigners who end up in Russia are, in “the Real Russia”. And Rasputin is one of its prophets.

A stamp showing Valentin Rasputin and a quote by him.
Valentin Rasputin on a stamp. The quote reads “Literature has but one goal – to help us as we read by breathing into us warmth and kindness”. Money for Maria celebrates the small acts of charity that we are all capable of.

After a time shuttling between Moscow and Petersburg one realises, especially if you look out of the train or bus window, that there is an awful lot of Russia out there that you hardly see in either of the capitals. It’s all well and good to read Crime and Punishment or The Master and Margarita – both of which take cities as their settings. But Russian literature has always stretched far beyond urban limits, as anyone who loves Chekhov, or the Gogol of Dead Souls, knows. To truly get to know the country these books were born in, one must pack one’s bags and head out into the great wilds of the small provincial towns, endless forests, and towering mountains. This world is Rasputin’s element.

Introduction: Rasputin and Siberian Fiction

Valentin Rasputin was born in Irkutsk Oblast, the area of Russia lying immediately west of Lake Baikal, and he spent most of his life in Siberia – that unknowable mass of Russia that lies beyond the Ural Mountains, home to Dostoevsky, the Decembrists, and many others during their internal exile by the Tsars. Me, I’ve never been, but it’s always been something of a dream of mine, alongside the Russian Far North. Reading Rasputin, for the moment, is as close as I can get to that mythical land. It is a Russia that can no longer claim to being European, but simultaneously is unwilling to designate itself as truly Asian. I remember a quote by Vladimir Putin that goes something like this: Russia is neither in Europe or Asia, but Europe and Asia lie to the left and the right of Russia respectively.

Siberia is a different world, and it stands to reason that it brings something of a different literature with it too. One with a new (or, as it happens, old) set of values, symbols, and virtues. Rasputin is very much an inheritor of the intellectual tradition laid out by Dostoevsky and the later Tolstoy, both of whom idolised the peasant life and soul. Money for Maria, written in 1967, is a novella that both looks to the communal past while showing the ways in which the Soviet Union challenged it. But, well, is it worth reading?

Money for Maria – The Story

Money for Maria tells the story of a few days in a small Siberian village and a crisis that erupts there when a man from the government arrives in town. Kuzma’s wife Maria runs that local shop – an essential part of day-to-day life when other villages and the city are miles and miles away. But one day there arrives this government inspector to look through the stores, and he discovers that through Maria’s poor accounting skills – she’s not been working in the job for long – a great number of things are unaccounted for. As a result, she has to pay up to the tune of one thousand roubles – a huge amount of money. The inspector explains that if she can find the money within five days, she’ll be let off. But if she can’t, then the prison awaits.

A photo of the Russian wilderness at the edge of a lake
It’s difficult to have an idea of the vastness of Russia unless you’ve been there, or to another country like it – America, Canada, Australia. The beauty of its emptiness can at one moment inspire the greatest joy, and at the next nothing but fear. Rasputin leaves the nature in the backdrop in Money for Maria, but it’s hard to forget it anyway. Photo by Octagon [CC BY 3.0]

While Maria’s reacts to the terrible news by falling into depression and lethargy, Kuzma sets out to collect the money. The story is split into two strands. The present strand concerns one last-ditch attempt by Kuzma to borrow the remaining money from his brother, who lives in the city. As he goes on the overnight train he remembers the events of the previous days, where he tried to collect as much as he could from the local townsfolk. These memories are woven into the fabric of the first narrative. Through them and through Kuzma’s journey on the train, we encounter a broad variety of Soviet citizens. They range from the snide Soviet upper class to honourable old men, petulant children, and hard-working farmers.

A Kafkaesque Arrangement –Structures and Symbols

I don’t know whether Rasputin was familiar with the works of Kafka when he wrote Money for Maria. But when Kafka’s works were, eventually, smuggled into the Soviet Union, the Soviets originally believed he was someone living within their borders – they couldn’t believe that a Jew from Prague could have created his world for himself when it seemed so eerily like a twisted version of their own. Money for Maria is not overtly absurd, in the way that the short pieces of Daniil Kharms are. But in its structure, its underlying attitude towards bureaucracy, even in its setting and subtle symbolism, I get a sense of the absurd and of Kafka, nonetheless.

To begin with, there is the question of the money. One thousand roubles was, in those days, a lot of money. It appears to be more than most people make in an entire year. When Kuzma goes around begging for donations most people are only able to give him a few roubles. When the head of the local council offers to give him the month’s pay of the councillors there’s still not nearly enough to repay the debt. Though we know that occasionally Maria might have made a mistake, the scale described by the inspector is unbelievable. When Kuzma gathers together all the money he’s managed to collect on the night before he heads out in the train, he thinks that he must have more than anyone else in the whole town. The money quickly becomes a symbol for the absurd punishments meted out by an unknown and unstoppable state.

The train also reminds me of Kafka’s style. The idea that Kuzma is going, going, but never seeming to actually arrive anywhere because each mile is accompanied by lengthy detours into the past. It creates the same uncertainty as Kafka’s stories have, where one hopes against hope that the protagonists might – just this once – succeed in entering the castle, or proving their innocence, or whatever. At the very end the train does arrive, but that doesn’t change the overall effect. The story ends just as Kuzma knocks on his brother’s door – we don’t know whether he will be met with success or be turned away. The abrupt ending thus prolongs the uncertainty of the whole work, and refuses to grant the reader the respite from the feelings of persecution that a more positive ending would offer.

The symbolism of Money for Maria is also Kafkaesque, though this time closer to The Castle than The Trial. Kuzma spends the story waiting for snow to arrive, but it never does – not until the last moment. Until then, the liminal windy space between autumn and winter reflects the general feelings of uncertainty and fragility of peace:

“He thought that such was the time of year: neither fully autumn nor fully winter, but an autumn that at any moment could shatter, then winter would arrive.”

The wind becomes the main weather symbol, like the snow in The Castle. Here the wind comes to represent the fatalism of the characters – their feelings of powerlessness. Early on, Kuzma looks at the street and wonders whether people are going by their own strength, or whether the wind is just blowing them around instead.

Christian symbols are occasionally visible too, but under State Atheism it’s hard to know what to think of them. Like Kuzma, we are left trying to find hope in a world whose magic has been ripped out of it by state machinery. It’s up to the reader to decide whether its symbols should reassure or disappoint us.

The Politics of Money for Maria

We don’t know how that much money was lost. We don’t know whether the inspector is right. But we know that he can’t be questioned, and, like Josef K in The Trial, Kuzma tries to rid himself of the feeling of persecution rather than questioning the truthfulness behind the accusations themselves. The atmosphere of persecution and disbelief is also pretty reminiscent of Kafka. Here are two examples:

“And he did not move for a long time – it seemed that he was waiting for a miracle, when someone would arrive and tell him that the whole thing was just a joke and that the whole story about the shortfall was nothing for either him, or Maria, to worry themselves about.”

“Kuzma rested, but it was the temporary respite of one being tried before the moment of judgement, and he knew it.”

This atmosphere cannot exist independently of political questions. Kafka’s works are universal in that there’s little to mark them as originating in Prague as opposed to anywhere else. Money for Maria, meanwhile, is a clearly Soviet work. There is the history – the references to the Second World War; there also is the particularly Soviet vocabulary of Kolkhozes and other bits and pieces. This is not essential, by any means, to the work. But it means that reading it you are aware that it’s set within a particular place at a particular time, and that its problems are the problems of that time. Rasputin was a member of the Village Prose movement, a group of writers who wrote about life in the Soviet villages in the later part of the twentieth century. They were critical of the state, but ultimately nationalistic in outlook – and thus useful enough to remain publishable.

Another photo of the Russian wilderness
Just another photo of some empty space. I’d love to go to Siberia one day. Have you been? Why not leave a comment to tell me about your experience if you have? Photo by jxandreani [CC BY 2.0]

Rasputin’s criticism of the state in Money for Maria is not overt, and in its essence, it boils down to the traditional complaint of countryfolk the world over – leave us alone to get on with our lives. Stalin’s rule is implicitly criticised after one member of the town is described as having been given a fifteen-year sentence for a minor crime. But as for the modern state, there is only the silence to suggest the “crime” committed by Maria isn’t entirely real. And once, only within the context of this historical crime under Stalin, there is the suggestion that the mistake may lie higher up, on some rung within the endless mechanisms of bureaucracy, but that because nobody is willing to take responsibility and accept the blame for themselves, the person who is punished ends up being the villager, who cannot defend themselves. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment.

Dignity and Heroism in Money for Maria

With all that said, Money for Maria diverges from Kafka in a vital way. It places the supreme value upon the village community. While Kafka’s works showcase the endless isolation of modern life, Rasputin finds salvation within retreating to the old, close, ways of living. What this means is an emphasis on the kindness and generosity of those who have almost nothing to give. The same people who inspired Russia’s utopian socialists in the 1860s and 1870s, and Tolstoy later on, also inspire Rasputin. The kindness of the chairman of the local council in offering his and his workers’ pay is matched by the generosity of old men and women who give all they can to Kuzma as he wanders about. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who don’t want to part with their money – but Rasputin shows that in the village old ideas of charity still predominate.

This same attitude is reflected in the depiction of village people generally, even those who don’t know of Kuzma’s struggle. On the train he meets an old couple and a young man, and after a time the four of them start talking about love. It is a scene that would feel right at home in Chekhov, and Rasputin’s attitude towards the characters is equally Chekhovian. The young man’s wife has just left him, and he boasts about his serial infidelity. Life, he says, is boring with only one person. But in opposition to him the old woman says that she’s been with her husband without either of them being unfaithful even once, and that it’s never been boring. The old man doesn’t speak, and we might suspect – as does the young man – that the woman doesn’t know the whole story. But her love shines so brightly that we don’t worry.

In much the same way, Kuzma hasn’t always been faithful to Maria. But, as he goes around, collecting money, and travelling on the train, he realises just how much he loves her. Loyalty doesn’t always mean love, and the opposite can be true too.

There is also a small amount of humour in Money for Maria which further adds to this view of the world. The moment I remember best is when, having collected the council’s wages, Kuzma waits the next morning for the money to be gradually begged away by frustrated family members. First the wife of one of the worker’s comes, and Kuzma dutifully parts with some of the money. We sit with him in awful apprehension as we wait for the next guest. At last we hear footsteps outside, and a girl appears, one of the worker’s daughters. We suspect the worst. But then she tells Kuzma that she just wants his eldest son to stop teasing her at school. It’s a moment that defuses the tension and makes aware of the respect Rasputin has for the lives and struggles of even the most simple of villagers.

Conclusion

I started writing this piece unsure of whether I had actually enjoyed Money for Maria. As much as I had found the story interesting and new, it seemed to lack the passion and belief of the great Russian works of the nineteenth century. Now that I’m finished, I realise I’ve changed my mind a little. The story does lack great essays on the fate of humankind, and characters who I can see living inside me as long as I live. But it carries on the quiet faith in the common man and woman and their small deeds that Chekhov is justly famous for, while adding a distinctly Soviet, Kafkaesque twist to his work. Money for Maria is beautiful and warming more than it is deep. But it doesn’t need to be deep. It’s still well worth reading, and a lot cheaper than a ticket to Siberia.

Rasputin’s most famous work is a short novel, Farewell to Matyora. I’m hoping to read that too, once I have time and energy, but for the moment I’m putting Rasputin aside. If you want to read more about works set in Siberia, have a look at my thoughts on Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales; for another Soviet writer who shares Rasputin’s preoccupation with human dignity in the face of terrible circumstances, look at Andrei Platonov.

Have you read Rasputin yourself? What did you think of him? Leave a comment!