A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

“The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, but there was still snow in the ditches and in the woods.”

This sentence is from the opening of the Chekhov story “In the Cart.” Saunders has highlighted the hinging “but” of the sentence to show the subtle way in which this background description creates an atmosphere of uncertainty. The hopefulness of the spring sun contrasts with the desolate image of “snow in the ditches.” This is an example of efficiency—even a description of a landscape can tell us something about a character’s predicament.

“The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf).”

Saunders believes that fiction is important because it resists overly simplistic messages, such as those in advertising and social media. Good fiction develops our ability to pay close attention and appreciate complexity, so that we are less easily manipulated.

“that’s what an artist does: takes responsibility.”

Saunders is referring specifically here to the Italian director De Sica and to his movie Bicycle Thieves: The careful background detail in the film informs the viewer’s reaction to the main drama. Yet Saunders is also referring implicitly to the careful construction of the stories in the collection, which respect the reader and challenge popular ideas of the artist as selfish or irresponsible.

“We might think of a story as a kind of ceremony, like Catholic Mass, or a coronation, or a wedding.”

Saunders views the short story as a communication from the writer to the reader. It is like a ceremony or a ritual: There is a core of meaning in it, with different elements in the story framing and leading up to this core. The reader enters into a story as into a ceremony, with the expectation that what they are reading will tell them something and will take them outside of themselves.

“Every part of the story should be able to withstand scrutiny, a scrutiny that, we should note, is to be administered generously, lest our story become too neat and mathematical.”

This quote shows the contradiction inherent in a successful short story. A short story should be an efficient construction, with every line in it signifying and building on the previous line. Yet it should not be overly efficient, or it ceases to be surprising to the reader.

“She was always enamored of someone and could not live otherwise.”

This sentence from “The Darling” encapsulates the main character’s modus operandi—Olenka is a woman who must always be devoted to someone, or her life has no meaning for her. The surprise, as Saunders points out, is how the story finds variations on this simple premise, so that the reader is constantly drawn into the plot and Olenka comes to seem like a nuanced and complicated character.

“And when saying this Vasili Andreevich was honestly convinced that he was Nikita’s benefactor, and he knew how to put it so plausibly that all those who depended on him for their money, beginning with Nikita, confirmed him in the conviction that he was their benefactor and did not overreach them.”

As Saunders notes, the character of Vasili is believable partly because he believes his own lies. This characterization is also believable because of its simplicity and directness. Saunders describes Tolstoy’s writing as having a concrete, factual voice, and notes that even when he goes inside characters’ heads, his writing seems like factual reportage.

“‘That’s our way!’ he said to himself, experiencing a strange and solemn tenderness.”

In a moment when Vasili experiences a pivotal change of mind and heart, he transitions from a selfish character to a selfless one, dying to save the life of his peasant. As Saunders points out, the transition is believable because Vasili remains himself, even while his behavior is out of character. This is seen here in how he describes his action as “our way”—already claiming its heroic implication as innate—while still experiencing feelings that are new to him.

“He whom he was expecting came; not Ivan Matveich the police-officer, but someone else—yet it was he whom he had been waiting for.”

Before dying, Vasili has a dream, in which he is at home and anxious about keeping different engagements. The suggestion is that the unexpected yet desired guest in the dream is none other than God; the dream therefore shows the extent of Vasili’s spiritual transformation.

“any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another’s work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing.”

Saunders believes that good writing must be responsible both to the reader and to the story’s characters. He believes that any moral blind spots in a story amount to a failure to fully inhabit a character, and so can be improved technically. He points out Tolstoy’s moral blind spots, like a lack of imagination about Nikita, his peasant character in “Master and Man.”

“He recognized the nose as belonging to none other than Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, whom he shaved every Wednesday and Sunday.”

As Saunders observes, the main premise of “The Nose” is only one layer of strangeness in the story. Characters also react oddly to the disembodied nose, unable to break out of their routines to acknowledge the absurdity of the runaway facial feature, and in how the story is told. In this case, it seems improbable that a barber would immediately recognize a disembodied nose as belonging to one of his clients—or that this would be a barber’s first reaction on seeing a piece of human flesh.

“No, this is something I can’t understand, positively can’t understand.”

At the end of “The Nose,” the omniscient narrator declares that he is mystified by the story that he has just related. In this way, Saunders points out, he paradoxically enlists the reader’s trust, and somehow makes the story seem more truthful. Such a style of narration shows that there is more than one way for a writer to appear honest and in control.

“We’ve been talking about the role of truth, of ‘the actual,’ in fiction. We’ve said that when a story references the world in a way that rings true, this draws the reader in.”

This quote opens Saunders’s analysis on “The Nose,” a story that is seemingly too surreal to represent the world accurately. Yet Saunders believes that “The Nose” accurately reflects the hidden strangeness of the world, just as “Master and Man”—the story that precedes it in this book—represents the concrete world as we see it.

“We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another.”

What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.”

This metaphor shows Saunders’s belief that a story must entertain as well as instruct—must be “thrilling” as well as “non-trivial.” The metaphor suggests a fair ride or an escape room, but one that works on the mind as well as the nerve endings.

“the point is that the voice-creation was an ongoing way of beating back any conceptions that might arise about the “outcome” or the ‘message’ of the story.”

Saunders believes that writers should not be too aware of their story’s theme or meaning while they are in the process of writing. They should instead pay attention to the story line by line, and in this way allow themselves to be surprised by what they write.

“Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, plunged into the water with a splash and swam in the rain, thrusting his arms out wide; he raised waves on which white lilies swayed. He swam out to the middle of the river and dived and a minute later came up in another spot and swam on and kept diving, trying to touch bottom. ‘By God!’ he kept repeating delightedly, ‘by God!’”

This quote from the Chekhov story “Gooseberries” serves as this book’s epigraph and inspires its title. The passage has a sense of joy and mystery, as Ivan loses himself in his swimming, amazed by the abundance of the water around him. It is also a resonant quote because, as Saunders writes, the story “Gooseberries” was possibly inspired by a swim in the pond that Chekhov took with Tolstoy, at the latter’s country estate.

“Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people.”

This is part of a forceful speech that Ivan makes about the immorality of happiness. Ivan’s friends react to the speech with boredom, which makes Ivan seem like the moral truth-teller among the three. Yet later in the story, Ivan leaves his pipe burning in the bedroom, keeping his friend Burkin awake; as Saunders observes, this small thoughtlessness makes the reader see Ivan in a slightly different light.

“The story just got enlarged. It is, yes, about the possible decadence of happiness, but it’s also now about how trivial it is to hold a one-dimensional opinion.”

This quote refers to Ivan’s speech about happiness, which comes to seem didactic. But it also references what Saunders sees as one of fiction’s roles: to counter simplistic opinions and to make the reader alert to nuance and complexity.

“The difference between a great writer and a good one (or a good one and a bad one) is in the quality of the instantaneous decisions she makes as she works.”

Saunders believes that writers, like athletes, must trust their instincts in the moment. It is not enough merely to know the rules; what is important is how writers apply those rules, and to what degree they bring their own taste and preferences to their work.

“This was something that he found out, to his amazement, that besides those connections between people based on someone needing something from somebody else, there are also very special connections: not a person having to clean boots or take a parcel somewhere or harness up a horse, but a person who was in no real way necessary to another person could still be needed by that person, and caressed, and that he, Alyosha, was just such a person.”

This passage describes Alyosha’s growing attachment to Ustinya, and his realization that human relationships are not always transactional, but can be based on pure affection. As Saunders notes, this translation is deliberately clumsy. Its clumsiness mirrors the faltering of a mind taking in an entirely new idea.

“Then something seemed to startle him and he stretched his legs and died.”

The ending of this story is simple but mysterious. The reader does not know what precisely has startled Alyosha; as Saunders observes, Alyosha could be relieved to go to God or despondent about the life that he has led. More broadly, the story could be seen as either an endorsement or a rebuke of religious faith, and Saunders suggests that this ambiguity is the story’s power.

“In a story, attribute must meet adversity.”

Saunders believes that a story’s drama comes from a character’s personality being tested. In the case of this story, Alyosha’s habitual cheerfulness and stoicism is challenged by his unfair treatment at the hands of the family that he words for. The challenge culminates in his not being allowed to marry Ustinya, the woman with whom he is in love.

“Alyosha dies not because he falls off a roof but because Tolstoy, at this late point in his art, knows what it is that we want to know and aims to give it to us as quickly as possible.”

Saunders views the story as a model of narrative efficiency. He argues that Tolstoy has Alyosha die to solve a narrative problem. Alyosha is an obedient character who has been treated badly, and the reader is expecting his repressed resentment to surface somehow, whether through action or dialogue—putting him on his deathbed allows this to occur organically.