A friend lent me this lovely book by George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). Its sub-title is: (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life). I've bought my own copy.
At Syracuse University, George Saunders teaches just six young and very gifted writers a class "in the 19th-century Russian short story in translation" - a precise description. For the duration of the book, we belong to this class, a great pleasure, also an honour. We examine seven short stories and he discusses them with us.
He writes: "Over the next three years [I try to] help them achieve what I call their "iconic space" - the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves - their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal... Some of the best moments of my life have been spent teaching that Russian class." The Russian authors are towering: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol.
"The stories are [...] for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical [...] but this is resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer's politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind."
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