Customer Reviews

The Forged Coupon

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Short, simple, and yet truly profound, The Forged Coupon reads like Tolstoy's last wish for humanity; compassion, kindness, and responsibility toward our fellow man/woman.

Young Fedor Mikhailovich needs money to repay a debt. After his father angrily refuses to give him any more money, Fedor simply changes a $2.50 note to read $12.50. What follows is an intricate tale of how one evil deed, one selfish act, affects the lives of dozens of others. Tolstoy wrote this novella in his last years, after his excommunication, and he relishes the chance to unveil the pseudo-piety and hypocrisy of organized religion. Yet, his belief in the individual's capacity to find truth is unwavering. Regardless of the theological overtones, however, this novella is priceless for its Aesopian message...that every act, good or bad, goes out into the world like so many ripples.

I give The Forged Coupon four stars only because The Death of Ivan Illych is superior. Still, I wouldn't want my bookshelf to be without this work from the master.

This brief novel, which does rather diminish into a sermon, nevertheless introduces a rich and varied range of characters. All of them are shown in terms of what they do or what happens to them. In either case there may be good, there may be evil. Regardless of which, there will always be reactions, responses, outcomes. And it's not necessary that evil actions beget evil responses, or that good actions have fortunate outcomes.

The story also spreads across the continent and, like the famous butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, the impacts are far-reaching and unanticipatable.

vgraine's summary of the novella's plot line doesn't have to be repeated, but the collection as a whole is very nicely done for a free download, and even if one disagrees with Tolstoy's premise, as I do, his metaphysical pushback against material gratification is somehow necessary, at least for the Russian soul. I have my issues with Tolstoy, and do not care for the message of Anna Karenina in its entire, but this quiet collection in his maturity asks us, I believe, not to be so grounded in certainty--and here the woman with the child out of wedlock survives, as opposed to throwing herself under a train--perhaps Tolstoy's realization that on balance, Levin and Anna were not given the same opportunities to pull themselves through.

More than anything else, The Forged Coupon reconciles me, in small doses, to Tolstoy's stubborn insistence that a Christianty based on humbled peasant simplicity is somehow incorruptible. All religions are human systems, and he comes closest to remembering that here.

After reading THE FORGED COUPON, I concluded that Leo Tolstoy would have me believe that if I cut off some other motorist on the freeway tomorrow, the anger I generate in that other driver could reverberate from individual to individual and eventually cause someone halfway around the world having a bad hair day to push the Nuclear Button. Thank goodness I'm not paranoid!

The premise of Tolstoy's last short novel, written in 1904, is that the effects of individual actions, whether good or bad, ripple through society causing unexpected consequences far removed in time and place from the original deed. THE FORGED COUPON begins with a father angrily denying his son an advance on his allowance, causing the latter to forge an inflated value on the coupon he's given instead. (In the storyline's time and place, coupons clipped from interest-bearing documents were commonly used as money.) The eventual repercussions of this act provide the background against which Tolstoy lashes out against the flaws he perceived in pre-Revolution Russian society: upper class greed, the oppression of the peasant class, the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the Russian Orthodox Church, the unfairness of the justice system, and the intellectual banality of the political leadership up to and including the Tsar. As a solution to his societyís ills, the author proposes a return to Christian fundamentalism based solely on scripture, and fictionally illustrates how acts grounded in such can be just as influential in the long term as those generated by mankind's baser motives.

The reader will perhaps find truths in THE FORGED COUPON depending on his/her personal value system. But is the book well done? The front cover of my edition calls it "a classic tale of crime and guilt". Well, it's certainly a tale of crime and guilt, but it misses being classic simply because it's too short. It's as if Tolstoy, who died in 1910, realized his life was coming to a close and thought he'd better crank this one out in a hurry. Had he taken the time to expand the novel to several hundred pages and develop the characters and storyline more, it perhaps would have had more impact. THE FORGED COUPON comes across as a rush job. Indeed, the CliffsNotes version is probably longer than the 88 pages of my edition of the original. Its greatest value was to provide me with some small insight into Russian social structure of the period - a structure swept away forever in the next decade by World War One and the revolutions of 1917.

This edition has quite a few typos, run-on words, even a paragraph that was divided by another paragraph in just the first 20 pages that we have read so far.