Customer Reviews

"In the Days of Serfdom" and Other Stories (Pine Street Books)

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

 

 

This collection consists of the 1863 novella "Polikoushka" (which the Maudes chose to translate as "In the Days of Serfdom") and the stories "A Prayer," "Korney Vasilyev," "Strawberries," "Why?" and "God's Way and Man's," each written in 1905 or 1906. It might seem an odd choice to juxtapose works written over 40 years apart, especially since Tolstoy's great religious conversion--generally seen as the major dividing line in his writing career--took place around 1880, but there's actually more continuity here than one might expect.

"Polikoushka" deals with events surrounding the recruitment of troops from an estate into the army. A member of a peasant family is chosen as the estate's last recruit instead of the title character, a domestic serf, but a tragedy that occurs to Polikoushka changes the course of things. "A Prayer" is Tolstoy's brief attempt to come to terms with the tragedy of a child's death. "Korney Vasilyev" deals with a man who returns home to make amends many years after crippling his daughter and leaving his wife upon learning of his wife's adultery. "Strawberries" sets the idle chatter of liberal aristocrats against the simple life of the berry-gathering peasant children living near them. "Why?" tells the story of a Polish revolutionary who is sent to Siberia and of the woman who joins him there to marry him and some years later tries to escape with him. "God's Way and Man's" is about two imprisoned 1870's radicals, one of whom finds peace in Tolstoy's Sermon on the Mount-based version of Christianity shortly before his execution, and the other of whom is shattered to learn of the futility of his revolutionary pursuits.

All of these works show Tolstoy's impressive sensitivity toward his characters, and we see much of his disillusionment with the artificial customs of Russian life, from the pointless meeting of the steward with the proprietress in "Polikoushka" to the absurd wording of the death sentence in "God's Way and Man's." "Polikoushka" is unusual among Tolstoy's pre-conversion work for focusing on peasants, which helps it seem at home among his later works. As for the other five stories, although by the time he wrote them Tolstoy had come to believe that the only worthwhile purpose of art was to provide a clear moral and infect the audience with the spirit of brotherly love, these stories (especially the longer ones) are really more nuanced than that. Just as Tolstoy had a hard time putting the values of Tolstoyism into practice in his personal life, it seems that in his art he couldn't help writing works more complex and interesting than what he believed to be appropriate (though he still certainly makes his message come through).

The back of the book claims that these stories are "now in paperback for the first time since their original publication," which isn't really true: the Gordon Spence-translated "Divine and Human and Other Stories" contains three of the stories (there's also a Peter Sekirin-translated book called "Divine and Human" that contains all five of the 1905-06 stories from this volume, but that book seems to be available only in hardcover). However, I'm not aware of any English-language book containing "Polikoushka," which is a very good work and the highlight of this collection, so I would tend to recommend this volume over either of the others.

These stories don't quite reach the level of Tolstoy's very best short works (I have in mind "The Death of Ivan Ilich," "The Kreutzer Sonata," and "Master and Man"), but they're still quite good, so if you've liked some of his other short stories and novellas you should take a look at this volume.