Out in the Country, But Far From Dead

The lines of the Scottish poem came into my head as I waited for my screen to come to life.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead 

Who never to himself has said 

      This is my own, my native land!

Okay, that was a digression. Couldn't resist. Back on track now.

I don’t generally underline in books. But when it's an old 60-cent paperback, and someone else has already underlined a lot in it and spilled coffee on the cover, and when the pages are literally falling out, for Pete’s sake – then I feel completely free to underline to my heart’s content.

Our reading circle’s latest self-assignment was Gogol’s Dead Souls, a book I’ve read more than once before but always enjoy re-reading, because just as you can't step into the same river twice, a book is always a new experience each time you enter its world. 

This time around I was very conscious of the ways Gogol refuses to keep to any recognized literary formula. Not only is Chichikov an anti-hero, but the author himself keeps intruding into the narrative to remind us of his characters’ failings (not just Chichikov, all the characters) and to plead for our sympathy. He mourns, in particular, the negative reception his protagonist is sure to find among critics and general public and how that will all bounce back on him, the author. Oh, poor me! An author such as I, “who dares to bring all that he sees into the open,” is much to be pitied!

All those things that an indifferent eye fails to notice—all the slimy marsh of petty occurrences into which we sink, all the multitude of splintered everyday characters who swarm along the drab, often painful road of life—he shows them clearly in relief, thanks to the power of his merciless chisel, so that the whole world may view them. This author will not receive world-wide acclaim, nor will he see tears of gratitude or feel the unanimous enthusiasm of hearts he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will throw herself at him, giddy with admiration for her hero; it is not for such as he to become drunk at the sweet sound of his own words; and, of course, he cannot avoid trial by his contemporaries, a hypocritical, unfeeling court, which will pronounce the characters he has created with such care insignificant and vile, will assign him a dishonorable place among authors who have insulted mankind, will ascribe to him the traits of his own characters, and will rob him of his heart and soul and of the divine flame of talent. This is so because his contemporaries will not recognize that microscopes ... are just as wonderful as telescopes....

“I’m showing the world as it is, people as they are, and of course I’ll pay the price for my honesty!” the author complains bitterly. Do you feel sorry for him, or are you laughing?

I laughed. Somehow in the context of the novel -- and though passages like these leave the story to one side for as long as they last, and so are not really “in the context of the novel” – somehow even these passages come through time as comedy, as if Gogol, dressed as a clown, pushes Chichikov off-stage for a few minutes, takes center stage himself, and cries the tears of a clown for a laughing audience before going over to drag Chichikov back into the spotlight.

George Lucas, of “Star Wars” fame, says he quite consciously followed the structure of Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero's journey: Departure, initiation, return. With Gogol, on the contrary, we meet the anti-hero Chichikov already well launched into his journey. He is no longer young. His quest is absurd. Only after ten chapters of misadventures does the author give us Chichikov’s background, the story of his childhood, youth, adult trials, and the inspiration for his journey. “Departure” is the final chapter of the book! And the journey is not over, either, when the book has been closed. Gogol intended Dead Souls as the first book in a trilogy. He completed one of the sequels but burned it before he died. 

It’s difficult to see what Chichikov would have done for two more volumes and what kind of conclusion the author could have found for his tale. No matter, I say. I find this novel ever so much funnier and more believable and satisfying than Gogol’s famous short stories.

There is another story formula that Dead Souls does not fit. -- In fact, as many formulae as there are, it’s a safe bet that Dead Souls fits none of them, but the one I have in mind was laid out by Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher mystery novels, in a talk he gave in Traverse City at the National Writers Series. Here’s the formula: There is a town with a problem it cannot solve. A stranger arrives. He solves the problem and is rewarded. Think of the riddle of the Sphinx, which no one could answer until Oedipus appeared on the scene.

Well, Chichikov comes to town as a stranger, but the village where he lands had no obvious problem before his arrival. It's a place where nothing much seems to happen at all, which is why everyone is so delighted to welcome a stranger. But then Chichikov's bizarre, incomprehensible business deals get everyone stirred everyone up and give rise to even more bizarre speculations until all hell breaks loose! And far from laying to rest the fears he has produced, Chichikov is lucky to escape with his own skin!

As he did in his short stories, Gogol again trots out generalizations and stereotypes –

The haven was familiar, just as the inn was – the kind of provincial inn where, for two rubles a day, a traveler can get a quiet room, with cockroaches peeking out of every corner like raisins....

-- but with his own distinctive, remarkable additions, e.g., those cockroaches “like raisins”! Stinginess, he tells us, has “a wolf’s appetite and grows hungrier the ore it devours.” And who can forget the picture of Plewshkin, with his black eyes like darting mice!

In a way, Chichikov and his quest to acquire “dead souls” – that is, to acquire, by purchase or outright gift, deeds showing him as the owner of serfs who have, in fact, died since the last census, relieving the seller of the tax liability and gaining for himself, he hopes, collateral that will qualify him for a generous government loan – serve as a scaffolding on which Gogol builds the portrait of a pre-Revolutionary rural Russian village. Looked at it this way, the village is the main character of the novel.

I don’t know. I need to think further about this. Actually, I’ll run it by the others in the reading circle and see what they think. But be honest now -- weren't you relieved to find a literary topic rather than a political topic here today? 

Earth keeps turning, sun keeps shining....

Green, Green Grass Still Growing, Growing

With all the dry weather we’ve had, we’d almost convinced ourselves that mowing was over for the season. Then rain came. Encouraged and revitalized, grass reached for the sky. We mowed all evening on Wednesday. That night and Thursday morning it was raining again.

Northport is quieter – as, I’m sure, are many summer tourist towns, in Michigan and elsewhere. School is back in session, visiting families have gone home, their vacations over, and a general early autumn lull has set in. A certain number of older couples take advantage of the quiet time to do some leisurely traveling. Lake Michigan is still warm enough for swimming – more comfortable for swimming now than it was in June, when summer kicked off.

Friday morning was the last official farmers market day in Northport. A few vendors had dropped out, but it was the absence of all the summer people and tourists that was most evident on Friday. 

 

Our intrepid Ulysses group gave ourselves an easy assignment for September: Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. When we meet next week for discussion, we’ll propose more arduous works for the months ahead. I undertook on a somewhat arduous solo reading task recently, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, advised by a summer customer who grew up in Russia that it was a book worth reading although I could not expect to catch all the contemporary political references in the work. The general feeling of the time, however, one does pick up in the English translation. But what a strange, genre-defying novel! Fantasy, allegory, magic realism? And at the same time, the unmistakable traditional Russian flavor, with philosophy and religion and morality and folklore all woven through the dreamlike story, along with ordinary descriptive passages that might have come from almost any era. 

Was the author at all religious, or was it simply the moral aspects of religion that he found missing in Stalinist Russia, and how does the symbolism of the Crucifixion story connect to the devil’s visit to Moscow? Well, very challenging reading, indeed, and I’m glad I read it, but I would probably need to study The Master and Margarita in a classroom to get much more out of it than the basic story, a general sense of the political mise-en-scène, and many vivid scenes, from droll to hair-raising.

September is here. Rain has returned. My thoughts turn to Johnny and Rosanne Cash and their haunting duet, “September When It Comes.” It’s a good time of year to read Nick Adams, too.

Visions of Russia

Is Doctor Zhivago—more accurately, was Doctor Zhivago, when it appeared in English translation in 1958, a “new kind of novel”? So claimed Alfred Kazin in a 1959 essay entitled “Saints for Our Time,” commenting on how “peculiarly difficult” it was to judge the literary merits of a novel that was

...not anything like the great nineteenth-century Russian novels. It lacks the old-fashioned fullness of detail, the self-dramatizing “big” characters who struggle against an utterly provincial background to realize their freedom.

What [other] critics and literary intellectuals fail to realize about this novel, Kazin argues, is that Pasternak has undertaken something entirely new:

...to describe a hero who has to make a world, to be the spirit of life itself to people fatalistically sunk in tyranny and subjection.

The realization, however, does not do away with the difficult of the task, because

...we are now so likely to be in sympathy with Pasternak, to identify ourselves with his motive in writing the book, that we can be almost too eager to praise the novel and to overlook those sides of it that are merely doctrinaire, theoretical, and sentimental.

I want to say something about Kazin’s assessment of Doctor Zhivago as “a new kind of novel,” and to then say something more about Russian generals and, finally, about novels in general.

Kazin’s working definition of a “problem” (or “problematical” or “existential”) novel is that it will make its readers see “our own world” as “entirely problematical.” Perhaps by this definition any “problem novel” of a half-century ago is bound to fail, for don’t most of us in the 21^st century already feel our world to be problematical before we pick up any particular novel? And then, if Kazin is correct that Pasternak’s is a “problem novel,” must it necessarily fail any literary test of our time? In other words, must we understand and evaluate it only as an anachronism? More directly focusing on Kazin's claim, I ask myself these questions:

Ø  Does Doctor Zhivago lack fullness of detail?

Ø  Were 19^th-century Russian fictional characters “big,” and are Pasternak’s “small” by comparison?

I might have taken Kazin’s word on Pasternak except that he inspired me to read the novel, and in it I found a wealth of descriptive detail, very much in the Russian style—unnecessary (to the moving forward of the plot, that is), intoxicating, overflowing. In the following example, Yurii is on a crowded train, sitting on his luggage in the corridor. I want to quote a lengthy passage, precisely because of its “fullness of detail.”

The stormy sky had cleared. In the hot, sunny fields, crickets chirped loudly, muffling the clatter of the train. 

... All around people wre shouting, bawling songs, quarrelling, and playing cards. Whenever the train stopped, the noise of the besieging crowds outside was added to the turmoil. ...  

Then, like a telegram delivered on the train, or like greetings from Meliuzeievo addressed to Yurii Andreievich, there drifted in through the windows a familiar fragrance. It came from somewhere to one side and higher than the level or either garden or wild flowers, and it quietly asserted its excellence over everything else.

Kept from the windows by the crowd, the doctor could not see the trees, but he imagined them growing somewhere very near, calmly stretching out their heavy branches to the carriage roofs, and their foliage, covered with dust from the passing trains and thick as night, was sprinkled with constellations of small, glittering waxen flowers. 

This happened time and again throughout the trip. There were roaring crowds at every station. And everywhere the linden trees were in blossom. 

This ubiquitous fragrance seemed to be preceding the train on its journey north as if it were some sort of rumor that had reached even the smallest, local stations, and which the passengers always found waiting for them on arrival, heard and confirmed by everyone.

I love this passage, and it is typical of many pages of the novel, rich and full with details that make every scene come alive, “old-fashioned” in a very good way. I might also note that this kind of passage, as well as those indicating characters’ states of mind, is precisely what film can never show. (If the fragrance of linden blossoms could be piped into the movie theatre simultaneous with the appropriate scenes, would this give the effect of the written passage? What do you think?) And so I have to disagree with Kazin on this point.

What about the “size” of characters? How do Konstantin Levin, Anna herself, and Anna’s lover, Count Vronsky, compare with Yurii Zhivago, Komarovsky, Lara et al.? Kazin writes of 19^th-century Russian fiction as offering “self-dramatizing ‘big’ characters,” struggling against a provincial background to find freedom, while he says Pasternak gives us characters who must make a whole world, “to be the spirit of life itself to people fatalistically sunk in tyranny and subjection.”

I pluck a copy of Anna Karenina from my bookstore shelves. It is the Penguin Classics Deluxe paperback edition of 2002, with an introduction by one of the translators, Richard Pevear, and there in his introduction comes the first surprise, for according to Pevear

...none of the great Russian prose writers of the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of Turgenev, was on easy terms with the novel as a genre. Gogol called Dead Souls, his only novel-length work [my note: and unfinished, at that], a poem.

The traditional form of the Russian novel, you see, was “the form for portraying ordinary domestic life,” according to Pevear, and Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy all had other and bigger fish to fry. So, “great” as these writers were, they hardly saw themselves as “old-fashioned” novelists. With Anna Karenina, Tolstoy claimed for the first time in his career to be writing a traditional Russian novel, focusing precisely on domestic life, but also turning the “old-fashioned” genre on its head, by giving readers a “heroine” who was a fallen woman, one deserving of—and here the author seemed conflicted within himself—pity if not outright censure. I am not going to argue for or against Anna’s suicide as a judgment against her. My question here is on the stature of the main characters and how Pasternak’s characters, especially Lara and Doctor Zhivago, measure up against them.

(There are so many minor and incidental characters in Doctor Zhivago, some of them appearing only for a page, a brief passage, others reappearing at different points in the story, that their sheer number alone contributes to the “fullness of detail” in this work of fiction. The movie cannot begin to do justice to the cast of characters. No film-goer would be able to keep them straight. Reading, however, is more like life: we don’t expect that everyone we meet will become a permanent part of our lives.)

In both novels, the lives of the characters play out against the backdrop of a huge, sprawling country, in a time of social change, with pressures on individuals to make critical decisions and to choose among radically different possible lives. For Kitty and for Anna, marriage and family were givens, women’s goals as handed down by tradition, but even within this prescribed domain there were social changes afoot and thus uncertainty. How was Kitty to find a husband, with arranged marriages now considered “old-fashioned”? As for flirtation and infidelity, society was prepared to smile and look the other way so as not to see a married woman engaging in an affair, but the price of this was that the woman not take the affair seriously. Both in the case of marriage and in that of adultery, love, the wild card, presented problems. The same cause of personal anguish and contravention of social norms comes into the life of Yurii Andreievich when he falls in love with Lara. Revolutionary Russian life had no place for the concerns of Yurii and Lara’s love affair--but the earlier Russia had not been able to make a place for Anna and Vronsky’s love, either.

Of course there is more at stake than love, and the stature of the main characters must be considered against larger issues, social and historical. For Levin, the question of how he should live is paramount. How to regulate his family life, how to manage his farm, what relationship he is to have with the peasants who work his land—all these questions torment Levin, and he must find his own answers as an individual, whatever tradition or the church or his neighbors have decided for themselves. Zhivago’s questions have more to do with art—primarily, his own creative work as a poet and his place as a poet in the society of his time--but again, no one else can give him answers.

I may not be coming at Kazin’s question from the perspective of his concerns, and perhaps I am missing something essential, but for me a red flag went up when I encountered this phrase: “his motive in writing the book.” A single motive? Could either Tolstoy or Pasternak give one all-embracing reason? Could Tolstoy say, “I wrote Anna Karenina to show x” or Pasternak say, “I wrote Doctor Zhivago to illustrate y”? 

When I think about it like this, the whole idea of a “problem novel” becomes problematic to me. There may be mediocre (or better) novels written to highlight a particular social problem at a particular time, but they will not have the breadth or depth or richness or staying power of either Anna Karenina or Doctor Zhivago. We come back to these novels not because we necessarily have the same personal questions or social problems but because these characters live for us on the pages of their respective books. We enter their lives. We live with them. No, more--while reading, we become the characters and live their lives.

Every novel raises problems for its characters. Without conflict, there is no story. There are different problems at different times in history, but always, in every age, there are individuals looking for their own answers, and any serious novel is an exploration of specific individuals doing just that. In my opinion--what do you think?