Tag: Russian Literature

Famine and Affluence; Fathers and Children

The idea of this piece is to compare the radicalism Turgenev portrays in Fathers and Sons with Peter Singer’s ideas about charity as discussed in his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. The comparison is in some sense arbitrary, but I hope to use it to make the claim that what Singer suggests – essentially, that we in the developed world ought to give a large part of our income away to aid those less fortunate than ourselves – is not particularly radical at all, while Bazarov’s “nihilism”, the demand to “deny” everything, to take nothing on faith, remains a call that most of us would struggle to answer.

I am writing this piece in part for myself. The conclusion, that we probably ought to listen to Singer and give a non-trivial amount of our income away to charity, appears to me to be manifestly correct. But at the same time, I am not doing it and do not see myself doing it in the near future. I cannot argue against him – I am not a philosopher and my ability to reason my way out of abstract arguments is limited. But perhaps by throwing down onto the page what I think about him I may find a handhold by which I may begin to pull myself out of the prison cell of my own guilt at my failure not to act.

I will leave you to judge. First, we will summarise Singer, then we’ll go through Turgenev, and finally, we will attempt to bash the two of them together.

Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Peter Singer’s essay was written in 1971, during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. A large part of that country’s population was living and dying in terrible conditions caused by the war. Rich nations were sending aid, but Singer notes that the aid was not substantial. Britain sent little over 5% of the amount it had then spent on developing the Concorde airplane, while Australia’s contribution amounted to less than a twelfth of the cost of the Sydney opera house. Singer denies neither the value of culture nor rapid intercontinental air travel, but he notes that we would probably consider human life more valuable than either of those things. At least in theory.

Singer does not only criticise the response of states. He notes that people have failed too – “people have not given large sum to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs.” While there were exceptions, the average citizen’s response was inaction. And the scale of the famine and its coverage in the media meant that inaction could not have been from ignorance.

Singer argues that such inaction is unjustified. His argument in the short essay, which can be read here, is that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He gives the famous example of a drowning child:

“If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

If we agree with the principle about preventing bad things from happening, distance should be of no importance, nor should whether we alone can help or whether many can – either way, we should do something. In centuries past, I would scarce have known about suffering on a different continent, let alone how to avert it. But – and Singer is writing in 1971, recalling – “instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation.” We may say that we are better able to judge who needs the help when we help those closest to us, such as the local homeless. But even this is a somewhat leaky defence. Experts are able to assess the effectiveness of charities, providing reassurance that our money would be put to good use. We do not need to judge, and in fact, we probably lack the tools to judge as effectively as someone whose work has had them spend years honing their judgement.

What this means is that our excuses are inadequate. This leads Singer on to his next point, namely that we have an idea of charity that is wrong. Western societies think of charity as something extra, rather than as a duty. (Whereas it is one of Islam’s five pillars). Because it is something extra, we do not expect people to do it, though we may praise them if they do. However, if we spend our money on fast cars instead of helping those who are literally dying in ways that could be prevented by that same money, we are – according to the premises of Singer’s argument – in some sense guilty. We should give and take action, and we should condemn those who do neither. Giving is not “supererogatory” – it is not something above and beyond goodness, but a constituent component of goodness itself.

That human beings are selfish is not really a good reason not to accept the argument. That nobody else gives is also not a good reason – that is merely a form of cowardice.

And so, Singer draws his rather simple conclusion: “a great change in our way of life is required.” He presents a strong and a weak version of his argument. The former: that we should “prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance”, and the latter: “We should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant.” To use an example that has been beaten to death already, the loss of a cup of coffee at one’s local chain is certainly not “something morally significant”. But one could put that money to a good cause and achieve thereby something that truly is morally significant. You know, malaria nets or whatever the charitable flavour-of-the-week is.

In a couple of places, Singer has suggested that giving 5% of our income is a reasonable starting point for answering the question of how much we should give. This is all part of the big Effective Altruism movement and is not worth us fussing over now. For the purposes of this piece, we can summarise Singer’s argument as being that we ought to give more and sacrifice things that do not really matter in comparison with what that money could achieve.

Fathers and Children

Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862. Russia had suffered a crushing defeat in the Crimean War, with the result that the Empire was taking a long look at itself. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, but with terms that left them still very much shackled to their old masters. Localised revolts caused by peasants who could not read and had been too optimistic in their interpretation of the Tsar’s proclamation were punished with the usual state-sanctioned murder. At the same time, angry with the government’s unwillingness to take further steps to advance Russia into at least the 18th century, young men – and women – became increasingly radicalised. In the same year that the serfs were emancipated the Land and Liberty League was founded, whose most famous act was the murder of the chief of police. Tsar Alexander II himself, who had started his reign with such reforming vigour and then very quickly forgotten all about it, would be blown to pieces a few years after that.

This is all after the novel’s publication, but the best literature tends to identify nascent themes of an age before they become generally apparent, and Fathers and Sons is no exception. It dramatizes a shift in the idea of progressive politics between the older generation, particularly in the figure of Pavel Kirsanov, and the younger, in the figure of Bazarov. The book’s original epigraph gives an idea of the shift we are dealing with:

“Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: “You had content but no force.” Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: “And you have force but no content” – From a contemporary conversation

The older generation in real life had such illustrious figures as Alexander Herzen, whom I’ve written about previously, but it managed to achieve precious little in practice. The new generation was impatient and wanted change now. The anarchist Bakunin (famous phrase, “a destructive urge is also a creative one”) was the most famous member of the older generation to “cross-over”. The young people themselves do not provide many heroic examples. The first one who comes to mind is Sergei Nechaev, who is the model for Pyotr Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons, having murdered an innocent man for the sake of trying to improve his revolutionary cell’s cohesion (it did not work).

Pavel Kirsanov, like Dmitry Rudin in Turgenev’s earlier novel of that name, was something of a revolutionary in his youth – both of them fought at the barricades in a France witnessing a revolution. Such action is, funnily enough, reactionary, or at least reactive. They joined a revolution, rather than trying to foment it. The narodniki (this later generation) actually went around the peasants, attempting to stir them into revolt. In practice, the peasants were just as conservative as the Tsars, and most attempts at getting them to revolt failed. Alexander Etkind has noted that the young revolutionaries often followed a particular pattern – “fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence”. Young men from seminaries saw Russia’s long tradition of religious dissent as being the secret to organising political dissent, not realising that the sects simply wanted to be left alone. Disillusioned, they turned to violence.

Within the novel, Bazarov enacts “going to the people”, as it was later called, in miniature. He speaks to the peasants on the Kirsanov estate, where much of the story takes place. But when he actually tries to discuss politics with them, they are bemused and think of him “as a kind of holy fool”. Still, Bazarov’s failure as a revolutionary is not the reason that he has become one of the most well-known characters in Russian literature. Instead, it is his passionately held beliefs that are responsible. He declares that we must deny “everything”. Whereas the other characters are wet and wishy-washy sops who like poetry and music, Bazarov’s language early in the novel is declarative, clear, and forceful.

And what does he suggest, apart from denial? Well, that’s the problem. “We clear the ground”, he says – the most important thing is to destroy. Everything that exists must be subjected to rational criticism as if it is a theory in a book, and if its foundations are unstable, it must be toppled. Religion, the Empire itself – these are things that at that time could certainly have done with a healthy dose of criticism. But Bazarov offers nothing in their place, only the promise that rationality will sort everything out.

Bazarov’s forceful character is in its way inspiring. But that same character disintegrates over the course of Turgenev’s novel. Bazarov falls apart when he falls in love. After all his declarative sentences suddenly it’s all mush with him. And then he dies. Turgenev, who was accused by both conservatives and progressives for his novel, ultimately considered himself a rather boring moderate. “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above.” This quote comes from a letter written to a newspaper, but even so, it’s hard to find much in Turgenev’s writing that contradicts it. He dislikes everything that diminishes human life, whether it be authoritarian or radical. But he admires the radicals of the new generation all the same.

Fathers and Sons ends with Bazarov buried and two weddings having taken place. The first of these is between Bazarov’s friend Arkady and Katya, the sister of the woman Bazarov falls in love with; the second is between Arkady’s father and his mistress, a peasant girl. There are few events better reflective of compromise and cohesion than a wedding. Whereas Bazarov’s love for an interesting woman fails, Arkady’s love for a boring girl who gives him an heir is more successful. At the same time, the ending suggests a certain amount of progress, for the second marriage shows that rigid social hierarchies do need to be adjusted from time to time. 

Comparison

We may consider both Singer and Bazarov to present radical ideas, but there is a great difference of degree. Singer asks us to reconsider our idea of duty, whereas Bazarov demands the complete reconfiguration of societies’ fundaments. Although there is an honest desire to improve the lot of the peasant in Bazarov’s views, or at least in the views he is supposed to represent, there is also something horrible. I can’t remember now who said it, and it may be that nobody knows, but one of the nihilists (Pisarev?) once said that a cobbler was worth more than Pushkin. This is blatantly false – it assumes an unbelievably limited view of human nature, one where art has no place. A cobbler is practically valuable, but Pushkin has had a far greater impact than even the best cobbler – he reaches to the soul.

When we go around destroying things, we soon discover that it’s much easier to break than to build. We might agree that religion is generally bad, and most would agree that an Empire is not the best political structure. But we are unlikely to agree about what to replace them with, and Russia’s experience has been that every time they break something, filled with hope, they have replaced it with something worse. Turgenev’s gradualism, as with any gradualism, is something of a cop-out. Martin Luther King Jr’s comments that the greatest enemy of black emancipation is the white moderate are pertinent here. Moderation all-too-easily becomes inaction. And many of the issues people face do cry out for action, not twiddling our thumbs.  

Emotionless Bazarov leads a life that can hardly be called rich. Those emotions that he does have are very much linked to the very structures that he would like to critique – family, love, and so on. I do not think that we cannot love without society, but it would certainly be different, and perhaps not nearly as nice. Perhaps that’s why I found the ending to E.M. Forster’s Maurice so unsatisfying. In that novel, the main character ends up in a relationship with a lower-class man with whom he has nothing in common except their shared homosexuality. This is not a healthy base for a relationship; instead, society needs to be changed so that they can experience full lives within it.

Singer does not say that we need to change society. Or rather, he does not demand the destruction of our values in the same way that Bazarov does. Instead, he asks merely that we readjust our idea of charity and give a little more away. Society, and indeed the world, would be very different if we all started giving to good causes. But our values would not be much changed, though we would almost certainly be better people for it. Bazarov’s ideas retain their radicalism today because they reflect a fundamental impatience to improve things. There are many problems with modern society that I think are in need of urgent redress – wealth inequality, various societal divisions, global warming, mental health, political and institutional distrust, etc etc – but I am not entirely convinced that we are capable of solving them as quickly as their severity demands. Probably we’d make things worse.

Taken over time, everyone giving to charities that actually work to improve people’s lives would actually improve people’s lives. Richer, happier people would build better institutions and feel more engaged in their societies, solving a whole host of problems. Engaging in charitable work will build social cohesion within developed countries too, and deal with some of our own many and varied problems. In short, in a boring way, Singer’s view can be considered gradualist. Our own world is arguably getting better already (I mean discounting climate change and growing wealth inequality, generally we are becoming richer and better educated worldwide). Redistributionist charitable giving (because any giving is redistributional, after all) will only speed things up.

And yet I know that there are Bazarovs among us. One of the main criticisms of Singer’s work is that it reinforces existing systems, rather than proposing new ones. In this view the reason we are all depressed and in unequal circumstances on a burning planet is because our current economic paradigm (capitalism) has brought us to this, and unless we change things up, it will continue to do so. Giving money away doesn’t help this. I am not sure how far I can agree with this view. I like to blame capitalism for everything as much as the next person, but it’s hard to deny the concrete good that charitable giving can achieve. Ideally, we should probably both aim to change the system while supporting people within it.

I myself have an instinctive preference towards local solutions, but it’s hard to defend this view without saying I care more about the people around me than those further away. If we work to engage with the local community, we build strong structures of the sort that can’t quite be quantified – things like trust. We make places better to live in for ourselves and others. And if everyone acted like this, we would all be happier. This is essentially what someone like Wendell Berry is all about. But the difficulty I see with this is that we cannot focus on the local issues without being aware of the global ones. Global news and global charities mean that Pandora’s box has been opened – now we humans have considerably more power, and alas, more responsibility. Too much, in fact, which is why we have failed, and Peter Singer and others yell at us.

Conclusion

Which brings us to the problem. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” doesn’t really ask that much of us, but it asks more of us than we are probably willing to do. It does not ask us to give up all luxuries (at least the weak form of the argument, which is already asking enough), it still allows us art and music and friendship and fun. But it would deny us much that we have grown used to and think we cannot live without.

A society where we all give, even a little, is clearly a better and more moral society than one where we do not. It is a more responsible one too. We can argue that giving doesn’t work because it doesn’t correctly deal with pernicious systems, or that a local approach is better – but there is one way that we cannot, I think, argue. We cannot say that doing nothing is morally alright. One can try, of course. But it seems that we must, if we are to go to sleep guiltlessly, act.

The things that make life worth living – our friends, our families, our communities, our learning, our experiencing this rich and wondrous world – are not lost by giving. If anything, the loss of excess luxuries, of things we can go without, would only strengthen them all. With fewer distractions we would have a better, more direct, appreciation for friends and partners, have more time for communities and art. It is not a great ask, but at the same time, it is almost impossible. For I am a selfish one: I want to save and invest, I think already about my own descendants, about my own future. I think about all this even though I know I will have a roof over my head whatever happens, whereas the same cannot be said of those who today go to sleep hungry.

I want grand, heroic, solutions – if blowing up a pipeline or two would save the world, I’d be there planting the C4. But I don’t even appear capable of the unflashy and easy solution right in front of me – siphoning off a little of my large-enough pay check.

The world is a mess, but it is our mess, and I am desperately fond of it really. But it can be better. And Singer’s piece offers a clear guide on how to make it so. I cannot despise it for that. We must have things to hope for, and ways of making that hope come to pass.

And perhaps I should be fairer to myself too. All told, I have received my salary twice, and given the job has required me to move abroad, my getting-started expenses have been quite high. Perhaps it’s too early to say whether I will fail to do Singer proud. Time will tell, and one day this blog will shiftily or proudly display the answer.

As for you, readers, how do you sleep at night? Do you give, do you volunteer? If not, what can you say to undermine Singer’s argument?

Negative Character Growth in Chekhov’s Ionych

I have been reading Chekhov again. Chekhov is one of those writers who brings me such joy, and this is because he knows how to write. He reminds one that it is possible to write well, something not all writers, and certainly not all Russians, do. I wanted to write about “The Lady with the Dog”, and had even started a plan to that end, but I was so struck by “Ionych” (the next story I reread) that I felt I had to begin with it. “Ionych” is fascinating because it is a story about negative growth. The country doctor, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, falls in love with a young lady, is teased and rejected by her, and then decides to become a thoroughly unlikeable person as a result, leading him eventually to reject her himself when she realises much later that she had made a mistake in turning him down.

Negative growth is interesting because we are generally used to characters growing in positive directions. Our villains turn good, our good get better. Where mistakes are made, they are the result of bad character – of cowardice, or anger. But stories rarely show how entire lives can become mistakes, and how good people can become bad. That’s why it’s worth looking at “Ionych” in more detail.

The Plot

Dmitry Ionych Startsev is a country doctor who has recently arrived in the vicinity of the town of S. An educated man, as doctors generally are, Ionych is welcome in what little society there is in S., though his countryside practice means he rarely has time to visit the town. The society in S. is very limited, as is always the case in Chekhov’s provincial towns. The highlight, however, is the Turkin family – husband and wife, and their daughter Ekaterina, who is also known as Kotik (Kitty). Mr Turkin speaks in a very mannered way and tells funny anecdotes, his wife writes novels and reads them aloud to guests, and Kotik plays the piano. All this means that they are able to put on entertaining evenings for the inhabitants of their town. 

Eventually, Ionych manages to find the time to visit them. He is particularly entranced by Kotik, with the “innocent child’s expression on her face and the smooth, thin waist”. Though there is some family tension, for Kotik wishes to go to a conservatory to improve her playing and her mother decidedly does not desire this, and some of the usual dreadful treatment of young girls that we are probably used to if this is not our first time reading 19th century Russian literature (Kotik is barely allowed out of the house, so that she is protected from any and all “bad influences”), still the evening is generally marked by peace and pleasantness for Ionych.

When Kotik’s mother develops migraines, Ionych is called into the town more often, spending plenty of time with the family. Perhaps the migraines are even a ploy to weld Kotik and Ionych together, because if she were married she would never be given the opportunity to leave her husband to study elsewhere. Whatever the case, Ionych is in love with dear Kotik. One day, however, Kotik decides to tease him, giving him a note requesting a moonlit meeting in a local graveyard. Ionych shows up; Kotik does not. But though he is annoyed, Ionych experiences a kind of Romantic revelation of the world’s beauty in the graveyard. When he next meets his love, Ionych proposes; Kotik rejects him. Indeed, she rejects him precisely because she wants the freedom that not being his wife would bring. The problem is not one of emotions. But either way, Ionych is defeated.

Four years pass. Ionych, who had begun his story walking around the countryside, now owns a practice both there and in the city; he has a large, expensive carriage too. At the same time, he has drawn away from people – he finds them stupid and boring. And they, in turn, have started calling him a “puffed-up Pole”, though he is not Polish. In short, where once he was poor and liked, now he is rich and disliked. Kotik, meanwhile, has aged into Ekaterina, and returns from the conservatory each summer, though Ionych avoids her. At home, she already feels a kind of stranger and ill at ease.

But eventually they meet, once more the handiwork of Kotik’s mother. This time is both a repetition and a rejection of what came before. “He remembered his love, his hopes and dreams, which had so worried him four years ago – and he was embarrassed at them”. Kotik’s mother reads again, Kotik’s father says the same idiotic phrases, and Kotik herself plays the piano – nothing has changed. But emotionally, everything is about to fall apart.

She looked at him and was obviously waiting for him to invite her into the garden, but he remained silent. “Oh how good that I didn’t marry her”, thought Startsev.

What a terrible thought to read. But it gets worse, for Kotik invites him into the garden herself. She admits that the conservatory had failed her, for all the young ladies she knew were able to play the piano, and she was nothing special. She tells him how she thought of him while she was in Moscow, how ideal he was. But he does not propose. He thinks of his money, back at home, and the flame she had rekindled in him is snuffed out. Everything annoys him. He goes home and never sees the family again, ignoring their messages to him.

Later still Ionych drives about town “like a Pagan God”, so rich is he. People call him Ionych, rather than his full name. He has become his name – and not the personal, familiar, Dmitry. Yet although he is lonely, bored, and finds everything distasteful and uninteresting, nothing changes. He does not realise that he has made a mistake. Meanwhile, over at the Turkins, nothing has changed either, except that everyone is a little older. Ekaterina has become Kotik again, and no doubt will stay like that, sad and unmarried, the rest of her life.

Negative Growth

This is the story of Ionych’s decline into caring only for his money. We might ask whether Ionych always showed signs of badness and a quickness to judge – one thing the narration (in Ionych’s voice), notes early on about Kotik is that she is “probably pure”. But this is I think insignificant, because everyone has a little bad in them, but few have that badness gain strength over the course of their life as Ionych does. To encounter an example of negative growth in Ionych is therefore a kind of surprise. Just as in real life, we rarely encounter negative growth in fiction. Characters, especially main characters, tend to become wiser, learning from their mistakes. However secular we are, we like to see redemption take place for the evil, and manifestations of grace.

But badness can get worse. We often talk about regrets as something bad, and certainly they are when they consume a life and distract it from the present. But regrets can also make possible the righting of past mistakes. Without the interiority that regrets imply, we cannot hope to grow. Ionych ends up shutting himself down once those four years have passed. Kotik briefly makes him think of the past, but his embarrassment leads him to destroy his interiority to protect himself. This also destroys her hopes of another proposal. At the end of the story it is the narrator who tells us that Ionych is lonely, because Ionych cannot do it himself. In fact, he is probably not even aware that it might be the case.

Experiences change us. Ionych’s walk in the graveyard shows that he had a developed sense of imagination, but his rejection means that he fully embraces a terrible, limited, materialism. As a story, “Ionych” tells us about the consequences of not paying attention to ourselves and the people we are becoming. Oftentimes experiences, especially those involving rejection, are difficult to bear. We always try to make the most of them, of course, but often this can lead to us distorting ourselves in ways that are unhealthy. With no love, we decide to focus on work, for example. We lose one “success” for another, but don’t realise that the relative values of each success are vastly different. Ultimately, “Ionych” is above all a warning of the consequences that befall anyone who does not remain watchful of who they are and who they are letting themselves become.

Ionych can be read in English here: http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1292/

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.