Mirgorod: Four Tales by Nicolai Gogol

Source of book: I own this.

My wife found this for me in a used library edition. I confess I haven’t to my knowledge read any Gogol before, so I was eager to fill in the gap. Gogol was a Russian author of Ukrainian heritage who lived in the early 1800s. He generally fits the gap in between the grandfather of Russian literature, Pushkin, and the later masters such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Generally regarded as influential, he wrote in a mostly realistic style at first, before becoming increasingly fantastic and romantic as time went on. 

Gogol as a young man.

Mirgorod is a collection of four stories, one of which, Taras Bulba, is actually a novela. The other three are shorter, although not quite as short as a typical short story. As I often do with collections, I will discuss each individually.

“Old-World Landowners”

This is the shortest of the stories, and, although it is certainly long enough to qualify as a short story, it has the feeling of a vignette, or a character study. It is a snapshot of an old Ukrainian farming couple, and their last days. It was written early in Gogol’s life, and is believed to be based on Gogol’s grandparents. Not much happens. The couple live, grow old, and die. They are thoroughly ordinary, and don’t do much. However, her death starts off a kind of bizarre apotheosis. She, in seeming good health, announces she is going to die soon, takes to her bed, and dies in pain. In what is a striking parallel, Gogol himself would die in similar circumstances 20 years later. After she dies, her husband attempts suicide and generally is miserable until death comes for him. I can’t decide if this story is suppose to be more humorous or tragic. It is realistic, if a bit macabre, and certainly isn’t as grotesque or exaggerated as his later works.

Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba is a historical novella, based in significant part on a number of historical figures in Cossack history. The Cossacks were, before the Russian Empire, a fairly democratic militaristic group of affiliated tribes. They were organized around raids and military glory, and adopted the Russian Orthodox faith. Because of their culture, they were used later by the Russians as soldiers and “law enforcement” in the sense of the secret police. (Which, by the way, predated the KGB and its predecessors by centuries. Soviet Communism wasn’t so much of a change from Tsarist Monarchy as one might think.)

Taras Bulba the character is based loosely on several historical persons. Their individual stories are combined to give a full narrative arc. During Gogol’s lifetime, Taras Bulba was apparently rather popular, and believed to give a true picture of Russian character. To our 21st Century eyes, that doesn’t look very flattering, perhaps, but times have changed.

Taras Bulba is a Cossack leader, with great experience in battle, and respected by his comrades. He has two sons, Ostap, the extroverted natural leader, and Andriy, the introverted dreamer. They come back from the university, then set off with their father to join the quest for military glory.

This is where things start getting very unpleasant. Gogol was pretty viciously anti-Semitic, and this novela is particularly so. Basically, the soldiers decide they need something to do, so they go round up the Jewish merchants and drown them in the river. And Gogol seems to think this was perfectly normal and acceptable. Taras Bulba saves one, however, which is important because he later calls in a favor.

Not content to kill the Jews, Bulba riles up the Cossacks to go attack the Poles, breaking the peace treaty, and going against the advice of the current leader, who Bulba deposes. They head for Dubno Castle, to fight the Poles, who, as Catholics, are the sworn enemy of the Orthodox. After basically doing the whole “rape, plunder, and a massacre” thing along the way, they settle into a siege of Dubno Castle. Andriy by chance comes across the servant of the Pole girl he loves, and he essentially defects. A battle happens, and Ostap is captured, and Bulba is rendered unconscious. He comes to in time to bribe the Jews (see above) to let him see Ostap one more time before he is tortured and executed. After that, Bulba goes on one last campaign, wherein he ruthlessly slaughters every Pole he meets, including children, until the final disaster in which nearly everyone dies. 

 Dubno Castle.

I really wanted to like this one, but I found it pretty loathsome. It’s like every 16th Century idea of toxic masculinity, racism, tribalism, and misogyny was glorified as “true manhood” and “true national character. Ugh. Not only that, but the few times women made it in, they were there as the weak mother not willing to let her babies die for glory, or the wicked seductive woman wooing the man away from his true calling as a soldier. I just didn’t find it compelling at all. As I said, times have changed.

“Viy”

This was my favorite of the book. “Viy” is very much in the vein of the Russian fairy tale, a dark, supernatural, and malevolent tale. Gogol claims in the introduction to the story that it is just a re-telling of an older tale, but scholars haven’t been able to find the original. Most likely, Gogol invented it himself. It is, however, enough like genuine folk tales to pass for genuine.

This group of college students (“seminarians” in this case, with a really fun description of the whole schoolboy system in the tale) is on holiday, and set out across the countryside to their homes. They have to find shelter along the way, and that means begging a room for the night from whomever they find along the way. A trio is forced to shelter at this ominous farmhouse run by an old lady who is rather obviously a witch. The one character finds himself pursued after dark, and ends up on a fantastic journey at the end of which he ends up beating the witch. And then, back in real live, he is called upon by name to watch vigil for a beautiful young girl who is dying. Who is, as it turns out, the witch. And, well, things happen.

It’s just a short story, but it packs a lot into it. Thoroughly gothic and atmospheric, I really found it enjoyable.

“The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”

If you read Gogol in school, this is probably the one you read. This classic tale reads just a bit like Tolstoy’s moralistic short stories, although the characters are a bit more complex. The two Ivans of the title have long been friends, even though they are very different. Ivanovich is extroverted, genteel, and excruciatingly correct. Nikoforovich is quiet, profane, and a bit boorish. But the two of them are fast friends.

Until. Well, until a stupid quarrel over a gun, and an unfortunate use of a word for poultry, and suddenly the two won’t speak to each other, and lawsuits are filed, and...well, everything goes to hell.

By the end of the tale, a couple decades (literally) have passed, half the other characters are dead, and the two decrepit old men are still waiting for a ruling from the court. It is, shall we say, one of the stupidest quarrels ever, and it goes beyond just them to cause trauma throughout Mirgorod. (This is both an actual city in the Ukraine, and also the title of the story cycle. Ironically, “Mirgorod” means “City of Peace.”) The narrator concludes with the rather pessimistic “It’s a tedious world, gentlemen.”

This is an excellent story, as timeless as Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” It gets right down to our most base instincts, and shines an uncomfortable light on the stupidity of human egos.

***

That’s the summary of the four stories. Here are a few lines which I wrote down.

From “Old World Landowners:

The old man is described as “He was not one of those old men who bore you with their everlasting praises of the good old days and denunciations of the new.” Not a bad description of the sort of older person who actually connects across generations.

From the same story, I also loved this one:

Some conqueror rallies all his countries forces, wages war for several years, his generals cover themselves with glory, and it all ends with the acquisition of a patch of land on which there is barely room to plant potatoes; while sometimes two sausage-makers have a fight over some trifle and in the end their quarrel spreads over cities, big and small villages and finally, the whole kingdom.

Cynical, but a bit too true. Particularly in light of Taras Bulba.

Speaking of which, there is a really sad description of Bulba’s wife, the mother of the sons destined for glory or whatever.

Her youth was gone in a flash without joy or pleasure, and the bloom on her cheeks had faded without kisses, and her lovely breasts  had withered, and the beautiful girl became a wrinkled old woman in the space of only a few years. All love, every emotion, all that is tender and passionate in woman, had turned in her into one feeling of maternal love.

Yeah, basically, the men were off at war the whole time, her existence was reduced to motherhood, and then her sons were off to go get themselves killed, and she would never see them again. Life sucks.

Or how about this one, about education for young men:

They had been sent  to the Kiev Academy in their twelfth year, for all people of quality in those days thought it necessary to give their children an education, thought it was done with the intention that they should forget it completely afterwards.

Hmm, I can think of more than a few in my Fundie upbringing who were fine with education, as long as you came to the same (ludicrous and hateful) conclusion.

I also have to mention the crucial moment in Taras Bulba, when Taras challenges the current commander to break the peace.

“Well, General, it’s about time the Cossacks had some real work to do.”

“There isn’t any work for them at present,” replied the commanding officer, removing his small pipe from his mouth and spitting.

“What do you mean? Couldn’t they go on an expedition against the Turks or Tartars?”

“No, sir. They can make war neither on the Turk nor on the Tartar,” the general replied coolly, replacing the pipe in his mouth.

“Why not?”

“Because they can’t. We promised the Sultan peace.”

“But he’s an infidel. Both God and the Holy Scripture command us to draw the sword against the infidel.”

So much to unpack here. There is the “masculinity defined as warmongering soldier” thing. The “slaughter anyone who has a different religion” thing, and the “who cares about promises?” issue.

Hey, that sure sounds a lot like the xenophobic right, plus religious extremism, plus toxic masculinity! And more than a bit like Trump, right?

And it gets worse!

As Taras is making his move to displace the more moderate leader and incite the Cossacks to war, here is his argument, after spewing anti-Semitic bilge:

“Then there is of course the further consideration that there are many young men among us who have never been to war and who don’t know what war is like, and I need hardly tell you that a young man cannot exist without war. What kind of Dnieper Cossack will he make, I ask you, if he has not even once beaten the infidel?”

And it just goes down from there, with nasty appeals to racism against the Tartars, the Poles, and of course the Jews. Later, after Ostap’s death, Taras Bulba rages against all non-Cossacks, specifically targeting the idea that others are much like us. He claims that they may seem like us, but they are not us, being in fact subhuman, and unworthy of being treated with human decency.

This is my problem with Taras Bulba. It has so many great lines, is psychologically perceptive, with interesting characters. But it is so contrary to basic human decency that it feels dirty to read. You can basically compress all the evil and genocide of the 20th Century into a small pill and it would be Taras Bulba in a nutshell. Of course, Gogol didn’t see the future. He is just talking about the past, when a few horses and a siege and a few Jews murdered, as bad as those can be, was as much as he expected. The horror of two world wars, the holocaust, and Stalin’s purges likely never occurred to him as a natural consequence of the “morality” of Taras Bulba. But the germ of all of those is clearly apparent in Gogol’s story, and so many more like it. The culture in which they arose led inevitably to mass slaughter, sadly enough.

Leaving aside the rest of this, I want to end with one fascinating observation.

But the future remains for ever unknown and it stands before a man like the autumn mist that rises from the marshes: the birds fly about it wildly, with a flutter of wings, not seeing or recognizing one another, the dove not seeing the hawk, and the hawk not seeing the dove, and none knowing how far he is from his doom…

That’s a great line, no matter how one slices it. And it is one of the reasons why, despite my general dislike of the philosophy of Taras Bulba, I find myself fascinated by Gogol’s language. In general, I found this collection to be worthwhile, but oddly liked the less well known stories more than the famous ones.

The Hermitage Cats by Nicolai Gol & Maria Haltunen

Source of book: Gift from a friend.

This is a bit of an unusual book for the blog - it falls in the category of “coffee table book” although it is a good bit smaller than that image invokes. It is heavy on the pictures and light on text, more for perusing and enjoying, than spending time engrossed in a narrative. This isn’t a bad thing, obviously. Different books for different purposes.

Let me start out by disclosing that I am a cat person. I have had cats nearly continuously since age 5, and seriously love them. I love how they purr, I love the soft spot behind their ears, I love the way they sleep in specific shapes I dub “catiforms” (like cuneiform, but with cats…), and I like the way they aren’t perpetually needy. This is not at all to say I hate dogs. I actually like most dogs - just not Pomeranians, with which I have a long history of mutual dislike - and dogs mostly like me. I’m just a cat person.

So anyway, a friend picked up this little book for me last Christmas, and I read it.

The Hermitage is the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia. This museum was founded by Catherine the Great as a place to house her private collection. She located it next to her winter palace in St. Petersburg. Later, it was opened to the public. These days, it has expanded to five interconnected buildings - including the palace itself.

The Hermitage is famous for its cats. Famous enough that the cats have their own press secretary. Originally brought in by They live in and around the museum, keeping the rodents at bay, and entertaining visitors. In addition to the living cats, the museum also has a number of works of art featuring cats, many of which are reproduced in this book.

The text portions of the book cover the history of feline domestication around the world. (Russia was a rather late adopter.) The history of humanity is largely one of agriculture - and with agriculture came granaries - and with granaries came rodents. Hence, the need for cats, to protect the precious grain from the insatiable rodents. It has long been known that cats have been domesticated for at least the last 5,000 years - the Nubian breed is a point where the wild crossed into domestic. However, more recent discoveries show that cats and humans go back much further. A grave in Cyprus has both human and feline bones dating back 9,500 years. This is highly unlikely to be a coincidence: wild animals were not buried with humans.

Obviously, Ancient Egypt gets some love. There are plenty of cat-themed artworks from there. Europe was interesting for a different reason. While Pope Gregory I reportedly had a kitten he carried with him everywhere, by the Middle Ages, cats were viewed as in league with the Devil, and thus mistrusted. And of course, they were equated with witches. Cats were burned at the stake along with women. We still see this in the trope of the “catty woman.” Even now, in certain circles, cats are viewed as “feminine” pets, with dogs as the “manly” companion. 

 The Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Tintoretto (1554)

Note the allegorical cat trying to kill the chicken.

The art followed the views. Even during the Renaissance, cats are depicted as malevolent creatures. Later, the prejudice softened, and cats are pictured as a normal part of domestic scenes.

I found the section on China to be interesting. The primordial cat was named Mao - both phonetical and interesting in light of later politics. In China, as in Egypt, the relationship of rodents, food, and cats is depicted in some rather striking artwork. 

 The Cat Hills, China. Late 19th - early 20th Centuries

Japan too viewed cats as royalty. None less than Muhammad taught that cats had a special place in paradise. (I for one would find a paradise deficient without a cat.)

One final bit that was pretty interesting was the various Russian tales of cats and mice. Usually the cats win, but more memorable are the tales in which the cat is finally caught by the mice. They throw an elaborate funeral. Sometimes, the cat is indeed dead and the mice celebrate. Other times, the cat awakens and eats the mourners.

The book is short and fun, and does make me want to visit The Hermitage some day. 

***

And, because I know you want to see a couple more cat pictures, here is my little companion. Chocolate Chip is ostensibly my youngest daughter's cat, but she knows a cat person when she sees one. She likes to purr and cuddle while I am reading after the kids go to bed. And, while I typed this post, she took up half my chair.

Come on, scratch behind my ears again...

What? You think you get the whole chair?

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Source of book: I own this.

The Possessed should not be confused with Dostoevsky's book of the same name. Okay, the “Book Formerly Known As The Possessed” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The title is usually translated Demons these days, or The Devils. It also should not be confused with the movies of that title in 1977, 2009, and 2018. This book is a memoir written by Elif Batuman, and is named in reference to the novel, which does make an extended appearance in the book.

My wife bought this book a number of years ago - probably close to when it came out, although I don’t remember exactly how she discovered it. She read it, and found it interesting, so I put it on my list of books to eventually read. It seemed to fit in between other books this year. (I try to avoid reading books on the same topic consecutively. I prefer to have a balanced diet. And, to be sure, this book was like nothing I have read this year.)

Batuman is the child of Turkish immigrants, graduated from Harvard and Stanford with an eventual doctorate in comparative literature, and wrote extensively for the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. This year, she released a novel (which is kind of ironic, considering her musings on novel writing in the memoir.) 

The book is about her time as post-grad student studying Russian literature. It is a rewrite of several essays in magazines, along with some new material.

In what is a pretty ironic twist, Batuman failed in her primary goal, which was to get paid to study Russian literature in Russia. Instead, she ended up settling for studying Uzbek literature in Samarkand. In some ways, this made sense. Batuman is fluent in Turkish (although perhaps in Russian too now), and Uzbek is essentially a Soviet amalgam of Turkish dialects from the area.

What follows in this book is her story of her adventures and misadventures on this trip. From her host, who pretty systematically cheated her out of any amenity including working plumbing, to her visits to sites connected with the great Russian novelists, to the eccentric and interesting people her area of study brought into her life, the book is filled with engrossing incidents. There are also sections where she discusses different Russian classics (including the title work) and how they fit with both her experiences and her evolving view of life, literature, and writing.

I’m not even going to try to summarize it beyond that. It is a fairly rambling, episodic memoir - which is kind of how life is anyway. I would say it helps to be familiar with the major Russian writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, and their major works. It also doesn’t hurt to have some knowledge of literary theory, as well as history.  I am by no means an expert (and have yet to read some of the books mentioned), but I have spent some time with many of the books. I would say that this book has been some incentive to make sure I put some Russian authors on my list every year.

One thing that I learned from this book was that Turkish and Russian are related - I am not a language scholar, so this connection wasn’t something that I was aware of. Apparently, the Soviets (the Russian ones, naturally), weren’t eager to acknowledge this fact, and tried to cover it up.

Also fascinating in this connection was the origins of the various countries which seemingly magically appeared after the fall of the USSR. (I remember sitting with my brother, going through our very first version of Microsoft Encarta and reading about all these “stans” which constituted south-central Asia. Kyrgyzstan had both the best paucity of vowels and the most interesting tune for its national anthem.) These never really showed up on a map before the rise of the USSR. So where did they come from?

Batuman explains at the time that England was colonizing India, Tsarist Russia decided it needed to make a countermove. It took over the fringes of the Ottoman Empire - a region of tribal groups speaking various Turkish dialects known to outsiders as “Turkestan,” and classified the residents according to a fairly fictional and arbitrary set of groups. The “Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz” didn’t really exist in any recognizable way, but the Russians nonetheless pounded these round pegs into square holes, and annexed the whole thing. These groupings became geographical SSRs, and when the Soviet Union disintegrated, these newish nations emerged as the closest thing to modern nations these regions had known. As part of this, the Uzbek language (and others, I believe) were essentially created from an awkward mashup of dialects, and forced on the people. Not that this is much different from the way national boundaries in the Middle East were drawn by the Allies after the world wars.

I’ll mention a few passages that I particularly found amusing, although these are by no means all of them.

One concerns Isaac Babel, who I wasn’t familiar with - probably because he was exterminated in Stalin’s Great Purge, despite being part of the Communist revolution, and his name and works removed from Soviet records. (This came to light in the 1990s. Also, he ran afoul of the regime primarily because he had an affair with the wife of an NKVD boss. Not his most intelligent move.) Anyway, Babel’s works are mentioned throughout the book. One really stuck with me. Batuman was reading Red Cavalry while baking a Black Forest cake. Apparently, the cake was a disaster.

As Babel immortalized for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalized for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which came out of the oven looking like an old hat and which, after I had optimistically treated it with half a two-dollar bottle of Kirschwasser, produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup.

Leaving aside the great word picture, I noticed it because my wife makes a fantastic Black Forest cake, complete with a more moderate amount of Kirschwasser, which is pretty much everything this cake was not.

There are a number of quotes from Uzbek (for lack of a better word) poets in this book. After all, Batuman was ostensibly in Samarkand to research Uzbek literature. As noted above, this was a total misnomer, and she had to settle for the writers native to what would eventually become Uzbekistan. One of these is the poet Navoi. I am not sure exactly how these poems sounded in the original language, of course, but there is a certain unintentional comedy factor as Batuman renders them. And I am someone who has a love for poetry. Here is an example that made me smile.

Was it my heart - a bird - that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night,

Or was it bats of some kind?

Remember, the sultan dooms to death even his closest friend

If he learns the latter has secreted away money from the treasury.

Speak, Navoi, if love has not yet crippled your soul -

Why do you spew blood whenever you sob?

There are a few more quotes throughout the book, and they are a bit unusual to say the least, to someone who is more familiar with the English poetic tradition.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of this book. It was interesting, amusing, and kept my interest. But it is also not for everyone. There are certainly moments where I think she might have been a bit more concise. And also moments when I think she wallows in her personal feelings and romantic drama. But it is a memoir, so you expect that along with the fun stories.

***

For what it’s worth, I read a bunch of Tolstoy short stories in my teens - mostly the parable or religious ones. Since then, I have continued to read from my collection. You can read my impression of his stories about the Crimean War here. A couple years ago, I finally got to War and Peace. I hope to read Anna Karenina one of these days.

But, the strongest impression was when I read his three best known novellas. The Death of Ivan Ilych was good, but it was Family Happiness and The Kreutzer Sonata which marked me deeply, upending a lot of what I had thought about sex and marriage. It was really my first introduction to a viciously anti-sex and anti-woman philosophy - except that after I read it, I couldn’t help noticing how much negative influence Tolstoy (and St. Augustine) had on Evangelical teachings on sex and sexuality. These books also rather confirmed my suspicions that marriage wasn’t just a matter of following the right formula or gritting one’s teeth and being loving. Compatibility - sexual and otherwise - was crucial. It is no accident that I intentionally talked about the philosophy of sex before I ever asked my wife out. Fortunately, she is both a good sport and a fellow lover of books, literature, and deep discussions. We are, shall we say, a match.

My brother and I both read The Brothers Karamazov in our late teens, and both enjoyed and found ourselves a bit bewildered by it. I listed the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” as an honorable mention in my list of most influential books. I have returned to that chapter multiple times, and think that it is still the best thing ever written on toxic religion. I have also read Crime and Punishment and Notes From Underground, both of which were fascinating.

I still have yet to read Gogol and Pushkin. They are on my list.

Whatever my deficits in Russian Literature, I have played a fairly good number of the great Russian classical works, both 19th Century and Soviet era. Comparing the literature to the music is a fun exercise.

Probably the oddest Russian book I have read, though, is The Master and Margarita.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Source of book: I own this.

I read this book because it was selected by a book club that some friends are in, that I wanted to join before the fates conspired against me. I diligently read the book, and was all ready to go, provided I could finish my tasks for the day. And, I had a whole afternoon to just install some shocks and struts on my minivan - hey, at 110,000 miles, stuff wears out. It had been a while since I did struts, but it wasn’t like I had to learn a whole new skill.

At least until my hand slipped and I let the hub swing down enough to pop the CV joint boot off the axle. And then discovered that the clamp used to hold it on was a single use clamp that I couldn’t put back on. Except it took me a while to figure that out. And then, once I had that done, I took a test drive, and I was getting a rattle on the other side. Not good. Since I couldn’t find an obvious problem like a loose nut, there was nothing for it but to take it apart and reassemble it. Which worked, for reasons I still don’t understand. But by then, I was already an hour late and looked like I had bathed in brake dust. Sigh.

So I missed the discussion. But at least I can blog about it, right?

The Master and Margarita was written between 1928 and 1940, in the Soviet Union. By the time I became aware of the USSR, things had ossified significantly, and not too many alive at the time remembered life before Lenin. But when this was written, the revolution was the recent past. A mere decade ago, and artists like Mikhail Bulgakov, born in 1891, not only remembered life “before,” but had had careers and successes before that time.

Bulgakov served as a doctor in World War I (receiving several serious injuries), before switching to writing after the war. Most of his family emigrated to France after the revolution - they were loyal Whites. Bulgakov was prevented from doing so because he was ill with typhus, and couldn’t be moved.

Although he initially had some success with his plays and novels, he managed to get on the wrong side of Stalin, and his works were banned in 1929. Bulgakov was devastated and puzzled, as Stalin had championed his writing numerous times before. But apparently, the satire of the Soviet system, while popular with audiences, enraged a few influential critics who had Stalin’s ear. It was during this time of travail that Bulgakov began writing The Master and Margarita. He burned the first draft, then re-wrote it with significant changes, not least of which was the character of Margarita, which was inspired by his third wife, whom he married in 1932.

Bulgakov’s works remained banned until his death in 1940. He intended to submit this final work to the publisher, but he still had a few loose sentences to tie up. Chances are, his friends would have prevented him from doing so anyway, as the political consequences for Bulgakov would have been devastating. His widow waited for 26 years, before publishing it in 1966. Even then, it was published in a censored version. As was the practice at the time, the omitted portions were “unofficially” distributed as a handwritten supplement.

The novel is a classic example of early Magical Realism. The setting and human characters are realistic, and respond as normal, ordinary people would to the intrusion of the supernatural in their midst. The book is permeated by references to Goethe’s Faust, and I would have missed a lot of the references if I hadn’t read that work - particularly the bizarre and philosophical second part. Even the name of Margarita is a reference to Margaret/Gretchen in the Faust legend - and the Master himself is probably intended to be a new Faust.

The novel kicks off with Woland (Goethe’s name for the Devil) showing up in Moscow and getting in an argument with the aggressively atheistic writer Berlioz. (Yes, this is a reference to the composer who...wait for it...composed an epic work about Faust.) Not only does Berlioz disbelieve the Devil exists, but he denies that Jesus Christ was a historical person. This was a popular theory at the time in the USSR, which was aggressively imposing atheism on the population. This is where understanding the time the book was written is key. Bulgakov’s grandfathers were both Orthodox priests, and it had only been a decade since the revolution. Apparently, part of the impetus for the writing of this novel was Bulgakov’s experience with a pro-atheism propaganda committee. Obviously the existence of the Devil threw a bit of a wrench into society.

Woland predicts to Berlioz that not only will he not attend his committee meeting that night, he will have his head chopped off by a woman. The conversation starts with Berlioz asserting that man governs his own fate, with Woland countering that man cannot even foresee whether he will be alive tomorrow.

“And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk” - here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz - “a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?”

“I must counter him like this,” Berlioz decided, “yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that, but the thing is…”

However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke:

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal -- there’s the trick. And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.”

I just adore the phrase “unexpectedly mortal,” even if the idea behind it is far from comforting.

However, Woland is indeed right, and Berlioz does become “unexpectedly mortal” soon thereafter, and his companion, the young poet Ivan Homeless, finds that his new-found belief in the Devil lands him in a mental institution.

Woland also begins the story within the story: a retelling of the story of Christ and Pontius Pilate. This story is begun by Woland, but is eventually taken up by the Master - a fellow inmate in the institution. This story is the obsession of the Master, who attempted to have the work published, but it was savaged by the critics, and he ended up burning it. (Hey, sounds just a bit self referential.) The story doesn’t exactly follow the Gospel accounts. Jesus is a mere idealistic human, there is only one disciple, Judas is an opportunistic hitman who is assassinated after the betrayal to prevent the secret from getting out, and a number of other details are changed. But there is a point to this. First, the very human Yeshua Ha-Nozri is even more of a threat to the Soviet authorities than a divine mystic - in part because he stands for radical love and the abolition of power. This all plays into the satire in the novel. But also, it is the conversation between Pilate and Yeshua that haunts Pilate through eternity. (And doesn’t it haunt anyone who has read the Gospels?) Pilate is involved in something so much bigger than he realizes - until it is too late. He just wants to keep the peace - and his job and therefore his life. But, alas, his name is now know throughout the whole world for all the wrong reasons.

When the story returns to Moscow, Woland is about to wreak havoc on the city. He and his minions, the tall and manipulative illusionist Koroviev, the short thug Azazello, the succubus Hella, and Behemoth the giant and sarcastic cat, take over an apartment and set up a seance at the local theater. During the show, huge piles of currency (see below) fall from the rafters, and women from the audience are given the opportunity to exchange their clothes for expensive designer fashions. After the show, naturally, the money turns to either foreign currency (a serious crime to possess) or worthless paper, and the women find themselves naked. More people end up in the sanitarium, one is transported magically to Yalta, and chaos ensues.

About that currency. The translation (and indeed most English translations) miss the point of this. The currency described as “ten rouble notes” are actually “chernovets,” a currency that the USSR attempted to replace the rouble with - to great disruption and embarrassment. This is one of the jokes that is kind of lost if you don’t know the background. On a related note, there is a fantastic website that is devoted to this book, and explains all of the historical and cultural background. I referred to this while reading the book, and it really made it come to life.

It is at about this point that we finally meet the Master and Margarita and hear their stories. This is a third of the way through the book, which is kind of odd considering the book is named after them. After we are introduced, we find out that the Master has written his magnum opus, a book about Pontius Pilate, which he has just burned. His mistress, Margarita, has tried to encourage him to not give up, but she disappears, and he first arrested, then is committed to the mental institution. She believes he is dead, and goes seeking Woland to get him back. She ends up becoming a witch and hosting the Walpurgis Night ball, before she is reunited with the Master.

In one of the iconic scenes, the burned manuscript is resurrected.

“Let me see it.” Woland held out his hand, palm up.

“Unfortunately, I cannot do that,” replied the master, “because I burned it in the stove.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,” Woland replied, “that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.”

“Manuscripts don’t burn” has become the most famous line from the novel: one I had heard before I knew the book existed. It became an axiom in the Soviet Union, and it represented the spirit of protest. As the Master says, it doesn’t matter if he has the manuscript, because it is all inside his head. The ideas do not die, they cannot be exterminated, even by fire.

I won’t go any further with the plot than that. The whole impression of the novel is a bizarre mix of slapstick, satire, surrealism, and goodness knows what else. It is crazy and it will make you crazy, just as it did poor Ivan. Or perhaps the world is just crazy and he is the only sane one. Or both.

There are a few additional things I want to mention. In addition to currency wars, the politics of getting a scarce apartment is a topic that Bulgakov takes time to thoroughly skewer. From the multiple families sharing a flat - but each with their own little bit of territory: a personal Primus stove - to the rampant bribery, the author raises the reality to the level of a farce.

This book has a lot of references to historical personages, some of which, like Berlioz and Schiller, really don’t need an introduction. But other more minor persons, particularly contemporary Soviet notables in thinly disguised portraits, are harder to recognize. Fortunately, these are footnoted in the edition I have. Some others are ones that I personally enjoyed seeing, such as the Concertmaster at the Walpurgis ball, Henri Vieuxtemps. Perhaps only music nerds will recognize him as one of the most influential violinists of all time, practically inventing many of the techniques we all use today. Brownie points to Bulgakov for passing over the more obvious Paganini (who was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil) for the more obscure yet more influential figure.

Another line really made me smile, and it occurs in the scene where Koroviev and Behemoth are having a last fling - literally burning the town down - before they all leave Moscow for good. They show up at the restaurant that caters to the writers and critics, where their identification is demanded. (Not just anyone can eat here…) Koroviev insists that they are writers, and opines that Dostoevsky never had to present papers to prove he could write.

“You’re not Dostoevsky,” said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

“Well, who knows, who knows,” he replied.

“Dostoevsky’s dead,” said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

“I protest!” Behemoth exclaimed hotly. “Dostoevsky is immortal!”

One final scene contrasts with this humor. Margarita, who is the voice of compassion in the novel, has a chance at the end to plead for mercy for Pilate, who is condemned to an eternity of unfulfilled longing.

“What is he saying?” asked Margarita, and her perfectly calm face clouded over with compassion.

“He says one and the same thing,” Woland replied. “He says that even the moon gives him no peace, and that his is a bad job. That is what he always says when he is not asleep, and when he sleeps, he dreams one and the same thing: there is a path of moonlight, and he wants to walk down it and talk with the prisoner Ha-Nozri, because, as he insists, he never finished what he was saying that time, long ago, on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan. But alas, for some reason he never manages to get on to this path, and no one comes to him.”

And this is the most beautiful moment in the novel, when the Master is able to free the character he has written his book about, and Pilate is able to walk down that path of moonlight with Christ as he has longed to do these 2000 years.

Without a doubt, this was an unusual book, not particularly easy to understand - particularly while in the middle. But in it one can see echoes of other books. Faust, most obviously. But also in the famous Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov, in the writings of Tolstoy. And one can hear the voices of the Soviet artists of the 20th century, all seeking to do what they must: to write, to compose, to express, to tell the truth. As all totalitarian systems on all sides of the political spectrum have always known, it is the artists that pose the greatest danger, because their truth runs deeper than censorship, deeper than mere words and notes, and touches the very soul. Art is, in its own way, like that longing to walk the path of moonlight, to transcend. Ultimately, this necessity has defied the many attempts of despots to suppress it. Out of Stalin’s purges and forced atheism came this novel which spoke of something greater, something beyond the cramped vision of material success and ideological purity. And Caesar and Stalin are exposed as no different from the inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s book, worshiping power and exerting control by creating an artificial version of reality. Like Goethe, Bulgakov sees Woland and Mephistopheles as forces that are ultimately beneficial because they challenge the mirage of human power and terror. I’ll end with the quote from Goethe’s Faust which Bulgakov uses to preface the novel:

“...who are you then?”

“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Source of book: I own this

I am not sure exactly how to count this book. I didn’t realize that the version we have is, technically speaking, abridged. I failed to realize this until I was quite a way into it, and decided to finish it up. Upon further research, it appears that the translator/abridger, Alexandra Kropotkin, took out the extended statement of Tolstoy’s philosophy on war and history at the end and the essays in the middle. In any event, this version is still 700 pages long, so the bulk of the text has to be in there. I am guessing that this redaction is more like The Count of Monte Cristo, (which does not appear to be readily available in English without some abridgement), namely the removal of commentary on French politics of the time. So, at minimum, I know the story in War and Peace. Should I find that someone wishes to discuss Tolstoy’s views on war, history, or gender relations, I can probably fake my way through based on the other stuff I have read of his. It would be interesting to go back and read an unabridged sometime, at least the omitted parts.

So, anyway, I at least can say that I have read the same version my wife read - she brought the book to our marriage. She read it as a teen, while I waited until age 40, but whatever. I get bragging rights for having read three Dostoevsky novels while she hasn’t experienced him yet.

I have read a decent amount of Tolstoy, however. The combination of Family Happiness and The Kreutzer Sonata made my list of most influential books. I also reviewed Tolstoy’s other major work on war, the brutal Sevastapol Sketches.

I have always found Tolstoy to be easier to follow than Dostoevsky, primarily because it is easier to keep the characters and relationships straight. Tolstoy seems to limit himself to two names and a nickname for each character, whereas - at least in The Brother Karamazov, it seemed as if each character had a different name given by each other character. I literally wrote names down on a pad of paper so I could keep them straight. 

Napoleon's Retreat From Moscow (painting by Adolph Northen)

For those who do not know, War and Peace is set in the years 1805 through 1820, during the wars between Napoleon and Russia. More accurately, one could say that the story takes place primarily in the years up to and including 1812, with the other years covered in what is essentially an epilogue, explaining what happened to the surviving characters.

In addition to chronicling the major engagements of the war, the novel follows several aristocratic families through the years. The children grow up and marry, the older generation dies, families experience financial ruin or windfall, and relationships are formed and torn.

I considered trying to summarize the plot, but decided against it. There are a lot of threads, all of them are important in some way, either historically or more often psychologically. Instead, I will comment a bit on the characters.

For some reason, I had heard several times over the years about what a great character Natasha Rostov was. I was rather disappointed. I found her to be one of the more annoying, least realistic, and insipid characters in the book. Her attraction seems to be that she is beautiful, and that she is “vivacious.” Now, certainly nothing wrong with either of those, if that is your thing. But it isn’t mine. Vivaciousness in this case seems to be extroversion mixed with youthful vigor, which is easy enough to find. What Natasha seems to lack is something deeper. She isn’t witty, she isn’t reflective, and she doesn’t grow in the sense that other characters do. Rather, she goes from a young and flighty girl to a controlling and frigid matron and mother. That this reflects Tolstoy’s rather toxic view of womanhood is obvious, but it is also disappointing because Tolstoy can write interesting female characters. In particular, Masha from Family Happiness is complex and convincing - Tolstoy writes from her perspective. Even within War and Peace itself, I thought that Princess Maria was a better character. She wrestles with her love for her father, who has given her an education but also a good bit of abuse. She ends up marrying Nikolai Rostov, who is driven as much by the need for her money to rescue the family fortune as he is by affection for her. (Not that Nikolai is a gold digger - he resists marrying for money until he realizes that Maria is genuinely in love with him.) Maria is the one who must be strong and weather all the craziness that overtakes her family: Her father’s increasing eccentricity and rage and his flirtation with a French woman a third his age, her brother Andrei’s estrangement from his innocent and pregnant wife, her death in childbirth followed by Andrei’s departure to fight Napoleon, Andrei’s catastrophically broken engagement to Natasha, Andrei’s eventual lingering death, and her eventual responsibility for everything as the last surviving adult member of her family. I would have loved it if Tolstoy had spent more time on her and a bit less on Natasha’s emotional attachments to unworthy males.

Prince Andrei is also a great character. If the above paragraph made him sound bad, it is an incomplete picture. He learns and grows as a result of his wife’s death, and admittedly is caught in a difficult position, between a controlling father, his disillusionment with a war that he must nonetheless fight in, and a fiancee who can’t remain faithful.

Like Prince Andrei, Pierre Bezukhof must wrestle with himself and his circumstances. Pierre is the illegitimate son of a fabulously wealthy - and philandering - nobleman. He is socially awkward (almost autistic, it sometimes seems) who has to find himself after inheriting his father’s fortune and becoming the city’s most eligible bachelor. Pierre is often a stand-in for Tolstoy himself, and his thoughts and opinions are probably closest to Tolstoy’s, particularly his epiphany of the meaning of life by observing a decent peasant man. Pierre is interesting precisely because he is so mistake prone. He seems to botch everything, from start to finish, except for a few acts of genuine kindness on his part which do not manage to go completely awry.

One of the key moments in the book is when Pierre, naive as all get out, is essentially roped into marrying Helene, who, it is strongly implied, sleeps around. (In fact, she continues to go behind his back, eventually dying of an overdose of abortifacient after she gets pregnant by another man.)

My least favorite thing about reading Tolstoy is that he is such a misogynist pig, and it comes out throughout this book. Tolstoy had a disastrous marriage, which, between his difficult personality and his later belief that sex was evil, let to a frustrated, trapped, disrespected, and deeply unhappy wife. There is a line somewhere near the end of the book to the effect that women should be interested in what their husbands say. Not, mind you, so that they can improve their own minds or become interesting conversationalists. (He really says this.) No, they should be interested and listen so that they can make their husbands’ lives and homes more pleasant. Gag. It is this same attitude that makes him speak admiringly of the way that Natasha learns to gently steer her husband without his knowing it, all the while giving up any desire for society outside the family, devoting herself completely and only to her children and husband. And the man wondered why he had a lousy marriage?

On the other hand, Tolstoy writes exceedingly well about war and strategy. He’s not the tactician that Winston Churchill was, but he shows a keen eye for detail and doesn’t have Churchill’s rosy glasses. Heroism is mostly a myth to Tolstoy, while blood and dirt and senseless death are very real. This isn’t to say Tolstoy is completely anti-war, because he certainly acknowledges that Russia had to defend herself against Napoleon. (Although I think he has a good point that the invasion was a terrible and unnecessary conflict that could have been avoided had either side not been so stupid.)

Reading War and Peace was one of my goals for this year. I’m glad I did, although I wish I had gone with an unabridged translation.

***

Any review of War and Peace would be incomplete without mentioning the other great Russian work inspired by the French invasion. Tchaikovsky commemorated the event in his 1812 Overture, one of the most popular orchestral works of all time.

When I first joined the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra 21 years ago, we used to play this in an outdoor pops concert every August. Although we didn’t use cannon (hard to get permits in the city…), we did use fireworks at the climax and at the end. Eventually, funding for the concert dried up, and we stopped doing it. We revived it once for a single year, and that year we included a high school choir for the chorale Save, O Lord, Thy People. This is the tune that opens the work, played by the violas and cellos. (I really wish I could play the viola part sometime. I love the richness of the tune.)

Here is the chorale in its original form, more or less.

O Lord, save Thy people,

and bless Thine inheritance!

Grant victory to the Orthodox Christians

over their adversaries,

and by virtue of Thy cross,

preserve Thy habitation.

Other tunes include God Save The Tsar and the Marseillaise. The latter is an anachronism, because Napoleon banned the tune during his reign - it was associated with the monarchy. However, Napoleon’s actual anthem is obscure, while the Marseillaise is and was well known when Tchaikovsky wrote the overture.

I really must mention my favorite tune from the piece, though, which is the folk tune At the gate, at my gate, which is played softly by the flute and English horn.

Here is the full overture. Enjoy.