George Saunders (1958 – ) is a writer and teacher of writing, “For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America.”
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021) consists of seven stories interspersed with Saunders’ analysis of the writing. It has been lying unread on my shelves – in my bedroom, staring accusingly – after I received it as a gift a couple of years ago. When Marcie/Buried in Print suggested we might read it together this year, one story a month from Feb to Aug, I jumped at the chance, and of course you are all invited to read along, just the stories or the stories plus Saunders
The stories are:
Anton Chekhov, In the Cart (1897)
Ivan Turgenev, The Singers (1852)
Anton Chekhov, The Darling (1899)
Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man (1895)
Nikolai Gogol, The Nose (1836)
Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries (1898)
Leo Tolstoy, Alyosha the Pot (1905)
Marcie is putting up an introductory post on the first of each month, to which she adds her thoughts on Saunders’ commentary on the 15th. I’m not sure that I will post every month, we’ll see, but today at least I will review ‘In the Cart’ and then say a little about Saunders’ comments.
The first thing I want to say is that the translation feels modern. If Saunders names the translator or dates the translation it must be up the back somewhere where I’m yet to find it. The Project Gutenberg version is translated by Constance Garnett (1861-1946) as The Schoolmistress.
The story begins –
At half-past eight they drove out of the town.
The highroad was dry, a lovely April sun was shining warmly, but the snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark, long, and spiteful, was hardly over; spring had come all of a sudden. But neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge puddles that were like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into which it seemed one would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything new or interesting to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning how many times during all those years she had been to the town for her salary; and whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and she always—invariably—longed for one thing only, to get to the end of her journey as quickly as could be.
She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her past was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again the school and again the road….
This is Garnett’s translation. Saunders’ is similar, just small differences. His, for instance, has “Winter, evil, dark, long …” and “For thirteen years she had been teaching school …” . I was hoping an older translation might give me a better idea of the rhythms of Chekhov’s writing.
Saunders’ method is to present a page or two of Chekhov followed by some pages of analysis – which also makes it hard to get into the rhythm of the story.
Marya Vassilyevna who, after thirteen years, must be in her early thirties, leads a lonely life, out in the sticks at a one teacher school, with just her bedroom to retreat to and a kitchen “nearby”.
My first thought is how alike are the Russian and Australian experiences (except for the snow!). Miles Franklin attended a similar school in the years up to 1898 when this was first published; as did my maternal grandparents and later my mother and her sisters in rural Victoria; Kylie Tenant’s Tiburon (1935) is another single teacher rural school story; and even in the 1950s my father’s early teaching experience was in similar schools (though at least he had my mum with him). And I guess I should say that Nellie McClung‘s school in Manitoba in the 1880s was the same too, including the snow.
Once a week she goes into town to collect her pay and, it is implied, to report to the President of the school board. The district inspector calls on her just once every three years, but an examiner is appointed annually to pass judgement on the pupils.
Here, Marya and the driver of the cart, old Semyon, are returning from town. They turn off the high road onto an unmade track through the forest, travelling for a while with well-off 40-ish bachelor Hanov who is on his way to visit a friend. Marya thinks vaguely romantic things about him. Their paths diverge. They ford a river which is in flood rather than take the long way round. They take a break: “Marya Vassilyevna sat down and drank some tea, while at the next table peasants were drinking vodka and beer, perspiring from the tea they had just swallowed and the stifling fumes of the tavern.” The peasants are persuaded to speak politely, there’s a lady present, when they leave they each shake her hand.
On they go. For a moment Marya has the illusion things might be better. Reality returns. They’re ‘home’.
Saunders says these stories are “for the most part, quiet, domestic and apolitical … but this is resistance literature, written by progressive reformers”. In the late nineteenth century the Russian peasantry, often still in semi feudal bondage to the landowners, was becoming restive. The first Russian Revolution, establishing a parliament (‘duma’) and constitutional monarchy, was in 1905. I don’t think this story gives any hint of this.
Marcie is a writer and her commentary is largely about Saunders’ insights into the writing process; I am a reader and my aim is to give the story context – the writer’s concerns; location, geographical and historical; related writing.
The descriptions of place are excellent, though I don’t know whereabouts in Russia we are, perhaps it doesn’t matter (I’m not sure how big ‘European’ Russia is). It is clearly in the Realist tradition of the second half of the C19th, portraying ordinary lives.
Out of all Saunders’ discursive comments, I took “It’s a story after all, not a webcam.” The story, he says, compared with real life, “is way faster, more compressed … a place where something new always has to be happening.” And, extraneous detail brings a scene to life. “We like hearing our world described. And we like hearing it described specifically.” He goes on, “Note the little burst of pleasure we feel as we recognize ourselves in Marya?” – that’s it, I agree entirely. That’s why I read fiction, to understand other people’s and therefore my own reactions to situations, to relationships.
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George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Bloomsbury, London, 2021. 408pp.