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

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Russian-Ukrainian novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His notable works include the 1842 novel Dead Souls, the satirical play The Government Inspector (1836), and short stories like “The Overcoat” (1842). His surrealist story “The Nose” appears in this collection.

“The Nose” allows Saunders to discuss the Russian skaz-style narrator—that is, a teller of anecdotes whose unreliability makes the stories paradoxically truthful and honest. Seeing beneath the surface of conventional reality and group consensus, this kind of narrator they is also implicitly political. For Saunders, Gogol is an important writer because of his joyful absurdism, and because he is an example of a writer following his voice. He is a reminder that “voice is not just an embellishment; it’s an essential part of the truth” (391).  

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian novelist and short story writer, most famous for the masterpiece novels War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878). His stories "Master and Man" and “Alyosha the Pot” are included in this collection.

Saunders discusses Tolstoy’s literary craft, and also his religious and political convictions. Tolstoy was a Christian who wrote a number of religious tracts; his politics were full of contradiction—Tolstoy championed simple agrarian life and the cause of the serfs, while being a vast landowner from a family that owned hundreds of serfs. Saunders analyzes how Tolstoy’s convictions inform the two stories in this book. In “Master and Man,” Saunders finds Tolstoy’s portrayal of the serf Nikita one-dimensional and simplistic. He speculates that Tolstoy’s real-life admiration for, but distance from, peasants may have informed this flat portrayal: Nikita represents a cause more than a human being.

Saunders suggests that the sketchiness and mystery of “Alyosha the Pot,” a story that Tolstoy himself regarded as unfinished, is its strength. Although Tolstoy perhaps intended Alyosha to be an example of Christian submission, the story contradicts this belief, presenting a more nuanced and ambivalent view of piety and goodness. In this way, the story is demonstrating what the writer Milan Kundera calls “the wisdom of the novel” (277).

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and short story writer widely believed to be the greatest practitioner of this form. His plays include The Seagull (1896), The Cherry Orchard (1904), and Uncle Vanya (1898). Three Chekhov stories are included in this book: “The Cart,” “The Darling,” and “Gooseberries.”

Saunders holds up these stories as examples of narrative craft. “The Cart” is a master class of how to deepen characterization in its treatment of Marya, the main character. Different aspects of Marya are revealed through the story’s setting, points of view, and narrative action. “The Darling,” for Saunders, is an example of a “pattern story” (165). It establishes a narrative pattern with its heroine, Olenka, who has a constant need to devote herself to someone; it then deviates from this pattern in small but surprising ways, producing narrative suspense. “Gooseberries” has a looser narrative pattern, and Saunders analyzes the story’s digressiveness, which he believes ultimately contributes to its meaning.