You may be wondering why I have suddenly included an essay in my journal. Well, I have been finding it increasingly difficult to write on the WordPress page as I can’t in crease the font. So I thought, ‘Why not cut and paste?’ And it worked! Friends, you don’t need to read the essay but rejoice with me in this discovery. It has opened up untold possibilities!
Is There Anything Distinctively ‘Russian’ About These Stories?
The stories under consideration in this essay all come from the nineteenth century and, while immersed in universal themes, they reflect in the unfolding of events aspects of Russian culture, society, landscape and climate which cast a special light on the unfolding of these themes. These works were written by Russians, about Russians and for Russians, so contain little explanation of customs, features of geography or social life. The universal themes are those of love, death, hatred, revenge, courage, mystery and spirituality.
Four of the stories deal with love and its destructive power. None of the protagonists in ‘First Love’, The Kreutzer Sonata’, ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ nor ‘Grasshopper’ escapes unscathed, even the most culpable. Turgenev with Zinaida, Vladimir and his father, Tolstoy with Pozdmyshev, and Leskov with Katerina, reveal the destructive power of
obsessive love. The constraints of Russian society bring the unhappy lovers to breaking point. Vladimir’s father in
‘First Love’ is of higher social standing than Zinaida and this contributes to her acceptance of his domination. By contrast, the bored Katerina in ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ has power over the workman Sergei as she is the wife of a merchant of standing. Boredom and shallowness are the characteristics of Chekhov’s Olga, which lead her to deceive her doctor husband. Both Olga and Katerina are products of a narrow provincial life which often trapped women in Imperial Russia where there was little to occupy them outside the home. It is difficult for the English reader to appreciate the isolating nature of Russia’s vast landmass and the unforgiving climate which made travel impossible for many months of the year.
Tolstoy and Chekhov in’The Cossacks’ and ‘The Steppe’ give us some of the most beautiful and evocative descriptions of two vastly different areas of Russian landscape. Even more, the two stories are about two outsiders, Olenin and Yegorushka; one a soldier off to duty in the Caucasus, and the other a young boy leaving home for the first time to go to school. Olenin is typical of young wealthy Russians of the period who, bored by life and weighed down by debt, seek a new life in the army in the strange land of the Cossacks. His journey is related by Tolstoy in many descriptive passages which convey the effect on the impressionable young man of the dramatic landscape:
The rapid motion of the troika along the even road made the mountains seem to be running along the horizon,their pinkish summits gleaming in the rising sun. At first the mountains only astonished Olenin,; and then they gladdened him; but then, as more and more intently he studied the chain of snowy mountains that rose, not from other black peaks but from the steppe, growing aloft and fleeting away, he gradually began to penetrate this beauty and to feel the mountains with his senses.
Similarly, Chekhov describes the strange, alien mystery of the steppe as it appears to Yegorushka:
When he awoke the sun was already rising. Screened by an ancient burial mound it was striving to spread its light all over the world, eagerly casting its rays everywhere and flooding the horizon with gold. Yegorushka felt that it was in the wrong place, for yesterday it had risen behind him and now it was very much further to the left. And the entire landscape was different from yesterday’s. The hills had vanished and wherever you looked a brown cheerless plain stretched away endlessly.
As well as the effect of the landscape on the spirits of Olenin and Yegorushka, the people both characters meet are influential in their progress. The rich array of characters in both stories are typically Russian and in both tales the strangeness of the behaviour and customs alarms and yet captivates the protagonists. Among others in the Cossack community Olenin meets Luka and their relationship is complex. They are both rivals for the captivating Maryanka
but their expectations and misunderstandings of each other confuse and perplex them
Yegorushka, a frightened yet inquisitive boy, when finding himself alone among the drivers delivering wool, makes friends with most of them, despite his shyness. Their life is hard and tedious, bound by the immense distances they have to travel over the vast steppe and Yegorushka is at the same time terrified and drawn to them.
Pantely, who fascinates Yegorushka, embodies a typical Rusian trait which occurs often in different characters in the stories, that of a fondness for storytelling. He tells tales to while away the long evenings after a hard day’s travel. Daddy Yeroshka too tells Olenin stories of his life as a young Cossack. Storytelling is used in “First Love”, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ and ‘The Sealed Angel’ but in these works the stories told are the main story. This device of stories within stories is a common one in Russian shorter fiction.
The journeys made by Olenin and Yegorushka are journeys of discovery and often delight. Not so the journey made by Katerina, Sergei and their fellow prisoners to the desolate wastes of Siberia in ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’. Exile to Siberia figures much in Russian fiction and even in Russia today. As well as the harshness and heartbreak in Leskov’s
story, Chekhov too presents a picture of penal life in ‘Murder’. Chekhov’s account is based on real life observation by the author himself, of Sakhalin Island.
‘Murder, and ‘ The Sealed Angel’ illustrate another important aspect of Russian nineteenth century life, religion. ‘The Sealed Angel’ tells the story of a group of itinerant workmen who are Old Believers, as is Pantely in ‘The Steppe’. Old Believers were a sect which renounced reforms in the Orthodox church and developed their own way of worship. These masons carried around their treasured icons and it is the story of one of these which Leskov tells. Icons are a major part of Orthodox worship and Old Believers took the reverence of icons to a higher level. It is Leskov’s skill as a writer which draws the reader into this strange tale of an outcast sect and engages our sympathy; we really care about the fate of the Angel:
And heating the stick of sealing wax he jabbed the boiling resin, still flaming, right into the angel’s face!My dear sirs,don’t hold it against me if I can’t even try to describe what happened when the gentleman poured the stream of boiling resin onto the face of the angel and, cruel man that he was,raised the icon up so as to boast of how he’d managed to spite us. All I remember is that the bright divine face was red and sealed, and the varnish, which had melted slightly under the fiery resin, ran down in two streams,as if it were blood mixed with tears…
Chekhov’s”Murder’ draws us into the chaotic life of people whose religious beliefs and practices are even more removed from Orthodoxy. Yakov’s obsessions cause him to murder his cousin yet he finds peace and a right relationship with God in the sufferings of penal life in Siberia.
In these eight stories we meet people from varied sections of Russian society in the nineteenth century. We meet them
in varied urban and rural settings and through them learn a little about life in Imperial Russia. Yet, as with all great
storytelling we feel, to differing degrees, connected to these characters and we care about what happens to them. They are living out the joys and, even more, the struggles
of life and even if, for them, this is in the context of Russia, their actions and responses resonate across centuries and continents.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ivan Turgenev: ‘First Love’ from First Love and Other Stories, trans. Richard Freeborn, O.U.P. 1982
Leo Tolstoy: ‘The Cossacks” from The Cossacks and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff, Penguin Classics 2006
Leo Tolstoy: ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ trans. David McDuff, Penguin 2007
Nikolai Leskov; ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ and ‘ The Sealed Angel’ from The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Books
Anton Chekhov: ‘The Steppe’ from The Steppe and Other Stories 1887-1891, trans. Ronald Wilks, Penguin Classics 1984
Anton Chekhov: ‘Grasshopper’ and ‘Murder’ from Ward No. 6 and Other Stories 1892-1895, trans. Ronald Wilks, Penguin Classics 2002
Ronald Hingley: Russian Writers and Society 1825-1904, World University Library 1967
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