Another Christmas season and it’s time to pull out my Everyman’s Pocket Classics with 20 Christmas stories, each written by a well-known classic author. This year we start with Anton Chekhov’s short story Vanka. which is the sixth story in the compilation and one that will pull at your heartstrings. So let’s meet Vanka …
Where God Is, Love Is
Martin Avdéitch is an honest and hard-working shoemaker who lives in the basement of a building with only one window where he can gaze out on the street and see people’s feet passing by. Although his work keeps him busy with little time for socializing, he recognizes the people from seeing their boots as they pass. His wife, poor dear, is dead, as are his many children, however one little boy is still with him and while he thinks of sending him to live with relatives, he decides to keep him with him for company. Yet, alas, his son passes away from an illness and Martin is left all alone.
Well, I didn’t think this would be the first challenge I signed up for in 2020, but I was anticipating its announcement. Keely at A Common Reader is hosting a Russian Literature Challenge for 2020. Yay! I signed up for her Ancient Greek Challenge in 2016 and it was a great success. I can’t wait for the chance to read some more Russian Literature to add to that which I’ve already read.
Does the title of this short Christmas story inspire visions of Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick, sugar plums, presents and little children? Or perhaps you imagine the comfort of a good night’s sleep and the joy of Christmas morning? Well, wipe those thoughts right out of your mind. Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas is as far from the favourite poem of my childhood as I could imagine. He tells of adultery, the devil, thievery and unrequited love in a way that’s rather odd but extremely amusing. It’s certainly a different perspective on a very important evening.
“Once upon a time there lived in Moscow a man called Vladimir Semyonitch Liadovsky.”
“Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner of our district, who became notorious in his own day (and is still remembered among us) because of his tragic and mysterious death, which occurred exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall relate in its proper place.”
What a marvellously mysterious first sentence which brings all sorts of questions to mind. Why was the Karamazov father only remembered because of his horrific death? What else did he do in life? Why has the narrator waited thirteen years to tell the story? And why does it need to be told in its “proper place”?
“Inside the great building of the Law Courts, during the interval in the hearing of the Melvinsky case, the members of the judicial council and the public prosecutor were gathered together in the private room of Ivan Yegorovitch Shebek, and the conversation turned upon the celebrated Krasovsky case.”
Wow! My last Tolstoy novel read was War and Peace over two years ago and I’d forgotten the depth that Tolstoy could create within his stories with a clear, straight-forward narrative. The Death of Ivan Ilyich appears to be merely a tale of the last days of a Russian court judge, yet Tolstoy brings the human condition into vivid and startling colours.
Ivan Ilyich has a typical Russian childhood, becomes a respected and accomplished young adult who manages to climb the social strata with aplomb and an admirable acuity. He takes a wife who, though a nag, through his very avoidance of her, manages to give him a sharper focus to his work, and therefore her very shrewishness assists him in his social ascension. They have the average and respectable number of two children, a girl and a boy, along with the typical infant deaths of that period, and Ilyich’s life is complete. Except for one problem. He is dying.
With Tolstoy’s astute and penetrating acumen, the reader shares Ivan Ilyich’s last days as he slowly sinks into the realization of his approaching demise. In life, Ilyich was able to focus on the impermanent: his career, the appearance of a normal family life, his status in the community. All his worth was embodied in these transient things, but suddenly in illness, these symbols fade into obscurity and death forces him, almost against his will, to view his life in stark reality.
Initially, Ivan is confused, and cries out to a God whom he had previously seen only as a inconvenient afterthought:
“Why has Thou done all this? What brought me to this? Why, why torture me so horribly?”
Yet slowly a “strange idea” begins to form in his mind. He does not want to suffer, yet live. But how does he wish to live?
“As you used to live before — happily and pleasantly?” queried the voice. And he began going over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say, all these best moments of his pleasant life seemed now not at all what they had seemed then. All — except the first memories of his childhood ….. As soon as he reached the beginning of what had resulted in him as he was now, Ivan Ilyitch, all that had seemed joys to him then now melted away before his eyes and were transformed into something trivial, and often disgusting …….. And the further he went from childhood, the nearer to the actual present, the more worthless and uncertain were the joys …..
He was living ….
“…. as though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill and steadily as I got up it life was ebbing away from me ….. Can it be I have not lived as one ought?”
Death brings echoes of truth to him, but instead of accepting this burgeoning enlightenment, Ivan chooses to hang on to the mirage of the life he has lived and dismisses the idea. The reader wonders if Ivan will die as he’d lived, merely existing, and if the true meaning of life itself will elude his grasp?
 |
| Death and Life (1908-16) Gustav Klimt source Wikiart |
In spite of the title, much of the story is about Ivan’s life and through his life, we view his death. With each sentence Tolstoy drives home the futility and meaninglessness of Ilyich’s daily actions, that brought material success but failed to feed the soul within the man. It is only at the very end, with the touch of his son’s hand and a kiss, that Ivan experiences an epiphany that expands his whole world.
The universality of the story echoes with a profound yet practical resonance. Drawing from the narrative, Ivan’s life, though complete with success in business, a (on the surface) contented family life, and respect of his peers, it is really bereft of human relationship in all areas. Tolstoy himself says Ivan’s previous life “was the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful.” Ivan could be you or I and with his novella, Tolstoy prods us to examine the purpose of our existence. We need to evaluate our lives ….. not only just skate on the surface, but to dig deeply. What is truly important in life? What genuinely gives us life as soulful beings and not simply as materialistic creatures who live only for pleasure and business? And a question that has been on my mind often lately: How do we struggle against societal pressure to conform to the latter and find a meaningful existence, to live in the “now” yet reach beyond it?
I’m trying to get back on track with my Deal-Me-In Challenge, and I finally drew the first short story of the year, The Runaway by Anton Chekhov.
 |
| Science and Charity (1897) Pablo Picasso source Wikiart |
After a long journey, young Pashka and his mother wait at the hospital to see the doctor. Pashka has a boil on his elbow, but the mother has waited too long and the doctor scolds her, declaring that the wound is infected and the boy may lose his arm. A stay is required, about which Pashka is not thrilled but he is lured by the doctor’s promises of seeing a live fox and eating sugar-candy. After a sumptuous dinner of soup, roast beef and bread, the boy awaits the doctor to honour his commitment but when he doesn’t come, he explores the wards, finally returning to his own where he hears the patient, Mikhailo, coughing and wheezing. When he wakes late in the night, he finds three people at the dead Mikhailo’s bed, yet when they leave, the old man’s chest wheezes again. Terrified, Pashka screams for his mother, leaps out of bed and tears through the wards and into the yard, intending to run home but a graveyard looms ahead, and Pashka is intensely relieve to spot the kind doctor through a window in a building. When he burst inside the doctor’s words echo: “You’re a donkey, Pashka! Now aren’t you a donkey? You ought to be whipped ….”
 |
| The Runaway (1958) Norman Rockwell source Wikiart |
Well, what to make of that? There is the danger of infection, the tension of being separated from his mother, the doctor’s promises that manipulate (for good or ill, who knows) yet come to nought, the wards of sick people and the boy’s terror, perhaps at hearing a dead man who appears to still live. It’s curious, especially since Pashka’s condition appears serious, yet the reader never has a whisper as to its outcome. Chekhov himself spent most of his life in the medical profession, so one wonders if he is also exploring the psychological methods physicians might use on their patients. Through the boy’s eyes the doctor is “kind” but is he really? The boy has a serious medical condition yet no one seems to be rushing him to surgery, and the doctor has promised many delights for Pashka and is delivering none of them. What is behind Chekhov’s tale? Is it a simple tale or a story with a deeper meaning?
 |
| Birthhouse of Anton Chekhov source Wikipedia |
Deal Me In Challenge #11
“I am a sick man …….. I am an angry man.”
Notes from The Underground is the third book in my unannounced and (spur of the moment) Turgenev/ Chernyshevsky/ Dostoyevsky challenge. After reading Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote in response to it, his then politically persuasive novel, What Is To Be Done? , and in response to Chernyshevsky, Dostoyevsky wrote his powerful Notes from the Underground. I assumed that it would be an interesting literary, political and philosophical conversation.
Dostoyevsky begins this book with a monologue from a retired 40-year-old civil servant, living in St. Petersburg. He is our man from the Underground. His ramblings appear to be disjointed, sometimes silly and then, disturbingly insightful. But in this novel, is anything as it really appears?
” ….. doesn’t there, in fact, exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his own very best interests, or — not to violate logic — some best good …. which is more important and higher than any other good, and for the sake of which man is prepared if necessary to go against all the laws, against, that is, reason, honour, peace and quiet, prosperity — in short against all those fine and advantageous things — only to attain that primary, best good, which is dearer to him than all else? ….. to justify his logic he is prepared to distort the truth intentionally.”
 |
| The Soul of the Underground (1959) Jean Dubuffet source Wikiart |
The Underground Man argues that perhaps science is not the highest good. The behaviour of man under the laws of nature and of reason does not confirm them; man has a perplexing innate inclination to destroy his own happiness and well-being. One may argue that man needs to be brought into order, to conform to demands that will improve his life. But what if man does not want that, and further, what makes one think that this is even good for man?
“Even if we assume it as a rule of logic, it may not be a law for all mankind at all …… And why are you so firmly and triumphantly certain that only what is normal and positive —- in short, only well-being —- is good? After all, perhaps prosperity isn’t the only thing that pleases mankind, perhaps he is just as attracted to suffering. Perhaps suffering is just as good for him as prosperity.”
Using historical examples, the Underground Man strengthens his argument. Man is beyond nature, and beyond reality; he is infinitely more complex than science, and therefore beyond the ability of science to completely understand him.
With his Underground Man, Dostoyevsky is attempting to shatter the philosophy seen in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s, What is To Be Done?, a novel that promoted a type of monistic materialism brought about through a rational egoism: if only one used reason to discern the higher purpose of man, working through enlightened self-interest the perfect society would be created. Chernyshevsky’s dogmatic ideology excluded the possibility of “free will”, labelling it as a mistaken perception of what was simply a causal process. However Dostoyevsky, from his years in a prison camp, had continually witnessed the innate human desire to express individual free will, often to the person’s own detriment, and with his Underground Man, he strove to prove the ridiculousness of Chernyshevsky’s philosophy:
“all the beautiful systems, these theories of explaining his best interests to man ……. are nothing but sophistry. Isn’t there something that is dearer to almost every man than his own very best interests, some best good which is more important and higher than any other good, and for the sake of which man is prepared, if necessary, to go against all the laws — that is against reason, honour, peace and quiet, prosperity — only to attain that primary, best good, which is dearer to him than all else?”
“One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness — that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit into any classification, and the commission of which always sends all systems and theories to the devil. Where did all the sages get the idea that a man’s desires must be normal and virtuous? Why do they imagine that he must be normal and virtuous? Why do they imagine that he must inevitably will what is reasonable and profitable? What a man meeds is simply and solely independent volition, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”
 |
| Underground Chud (1928) Nicolas Roerich source Wikiart |
The second part of the novel, entitled “Falling Sleet”, tells of the experiences of the Undergound Man. First, he is disrespected by an officer on the street who will not give way to him and the Underground Man plots a revenge of deliberately bumping into him. The narrative then moves to the Underground Man’s presence at a party for old school mates and his contentious behaviour towards them, as he feels the strength his inadequacies in their presence. Finally, he falls into a type of relationship with a sympathetic prostitute named Liza. In the Underground Man’s interactions with the outside world, the reader sees a man struggling to use his faculties to assimilate himself into the situations around him, and failing in his attempts. Dostoyevsky created a character who believed in Chernyshevsky’s ideals, but demonstrated through his actions, his inability to live up to them.
And so finishes my “trilogy” of conversation between these three authors. I have been educated not only historically, but politically and philosophically, and encourage anyone who wants to read any of these books, to read the three in sequence. With Chernyshevsky and Dostoyevsky particularly, you can sense the antagonism within their writing, yet their passion for their ideologies are very effective and make for enlightening reading.
“On the morning of July 11, 1856, the staff of one of the large hotels near the Moscow Railway Station in Petersburg was in a quandary, almost in a state of distress.”
What do Chernyshevsky, Nietzsche and Star Trek all have in common? They all believe in socialist Utopias, in that if we all just could see the higher purpose of man and allow our characters to be developed beyond the animalistic tendencies of greed and selfishness and jealousy, we would all be able to lead this idealistic life with money, freedom, happiness and, in Nietzsche’s case, right-thinking for all. Everyone would get exactly what they wanted in all things, and gratification and joy would abound everywhere. And this would all come in an erupting revolution that would change the world as we know it. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Except that there’s one catch. In all of history, men have never been able to shed all strife and avarice and enmity towards each other. We have never been able to only do good, love mercy and walk humbly. So how these people can expect this to happen in the rumblings of revolution, yet also in an easily perceived development of social change, is quite beyond me. “Delusional”is the word that springs first to mind.
 |
| The Young Seamstress Jean-Francois Millet source Wikiart |
In Chernyshevsky’s, What Is To Be Done?, Véra Pálovna is a sheltered young woman with a strident, lower class, controlling mother. Her mother tries to manipulate her with her machinations, but Véra, with stern self command unusual for her age and sex, manages to best her mother and ends up marrying a medical student and tutor, Dmítry Sergéich Lopukhóv, to escape her mother’s nagging domination. While married to Lopukhóv, she starts her own sewing business, employing unusual business acumen to make it a success. Likewise, her marriage is run in an unusual business-like way, to the apparent delight of both. Yet when their close friend, another medical student, Alexánder Matvéich Kirsánov, begins to form an attraction to Véra, an impending tragedy culminates, and finalizes in a most unexpected way.
Although What Is To Be Done? is almost unknown in classic fiction, among Russians it was considered one of the most influential books of nineteenth-century Russia for the ramification it had on human thought, and the effect it had on the history of the country.
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a staunch proponent of materialist philosophy, socialist political economy, and women’s liberation. In his novel, he attempted to provide a remedy for all the social ills and the dilemmas that faced Russian society, believing that the controlling patriarchal hierarchy of the family, social inequality, and political and social problems were the main causes of the tyrannical, unbalanced, economic backwardness of the society. He disliked modern reform, advocating more radical steps. Offering a blend of Russian traditional values, and ideas from Western Europe, he called for a social education that would bring sexual freedom, self-awareness, and prosperity. However, his self-righteousness and intolerance of criticism eventually caused him to be barred from academia, and Chernyshevsky was forced to turn to journalism for an outlet. His views eventually occasioned his arrest and he spent eighteen months in prison, which no doubt helped to advance him to the status of a martyr and enhanced the popularity of this book. He became a symbol of the ultimate revolutionary Utopian socialist.
 |
| Moscow, Smolensky Boulevard, Study (1916) Wassily Kadinsky source Wikiart |
This book served not only as a platform for Chernyshevsky’s ideas, but it was also a response to Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. In Turgenev’s novel, Turgenev explores the relationship between reason and emotion, or perhaps how emotion can undermine one’s ideology. In Fathers and Sons, both the nihilist Bazarov’s ideology and his underdeveloped grasp of emotion appear to cancel each other out, leaving him in a morass of ineffectuality in either. In contrast, the nobleman Kirsanov reaches a level of contentment using a combination of idealism and reason, mirrored in his recognition of family values, the importance of nature and the land on which he lives. Chernyshevsky despised the novel and Turgenev’s portrayal of “new men”; with his novel, he strove to counter the portrayal, borrowing character names from Turgenev and metamorphosing Bazarov’s nihilism into rational egoism for what he thought allowed for more efficient action. The ongoing debate continued with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s response to What is To Be Done?, in his Notes from the Underground.
Perhaps I was suffering with extreme impatience with naive “genius” philosophers and writers, but the impatience only increased with Chernyshevsky. Not only were his ideas born of some unrealistic fantasy, but the structure of his book was tedious. The book wasn’t really a story, it was merely Chernyshevsky’s ideas. Everyone is subordinate to his ideas, from his plot, to his characters, even his reader cannot escape. While I know that authors control their stories, I like to feel their stories control them to some degree; that the story is born inside of them with not only the passionate ideas that they breed, but perhaps with an insight that is not quite explored or realized. Then, voilà! A “conversation” is begun between reader and writer. Yet, with Chernyshevsky, this certainly wasn’t the case. Instead of speaking with you, he speaks at you. In fact, he goes so far as to address his readers with an intentional condescension, not only confessing what he is doing to you with his prose, but leading you down garden paths of supposition, professing your own ideas and putting words in your mouth, then calling you an idiot because you followed what he was offering you. I don’t understand it. Often these people profess to know all the ills of society and all the solutions, but they have absolutely no social skills or even an appearance of love for humanity at all; or at least it doesn’t come out in their work.
I’m going to read Notes from the Underground next to finish this conversation. Dostoyevsky confuses me, but he has to be better than Chernyshevsky. Doesn’t he ………???
