"We Never Make Mistakes"

By -

 "We Never Make Mistakes:" two short novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This is what I mean about my April reading slump -- it took me the entire month to read this very short, very readable volume.  I don't think we can call these two stories novels -- at best they're novelettes or longish short stories.  About 70 pages each.  Also, I love love love the cover design, with its stark buzz saw blade.  There are, of course, no buzz saws of any sort in the stories.

"An Incident at Krechetovka Station" centers on Lieutenant Zotov, who runs a small country train station.  It's 1941 and everything is overwhelmed by the recent German invasion.  Trains of troops, goods, refugees, medical supplies...there's not enough fuel to keep them all going, and nowhere near enough food.  Zotov has one competent assistant, Valya, and various other personnel who all seem to be lazy, corrupt, or very elderly.

A 'straggler' arrives in the station, a man who has been cut off from his unit in the confusion and chaos.  This Tveritinov makes a good impression on Zotov, and they become very friendly, but as Zotov hears his story he wonders if Tveritinov has made a slip.  Is he an enemy spy?  A White Russian officer?  Zotov decides that he'd better report the man; people who know better than he does will be able to figure this out.  But he's never able to forget the man, and when he asks about the case, he's simply told "We'll take care of your Tveritinov.  We never make mistakes."


In "Matryona's House," Ignatich, a man who has been been away for ten years (in the gulag) searches for a truly Russian country village to live in; he wants to teach and to enjoy the peaceful countryside.  He lodges with Matryona, an old woman living on her own in a tumbledown house.  It was once a very good house, but no longer; Matryona is not strong enough to make repairs, nor does she have the money.  She has practically no income, but scrapes by with her goat.  Ignatich gradually comes to learn more about Matryona and what her life has been like.  Despite all her hardships, she is a kind and generous person, and often helps her relatives or the kolkhoz even though they do nothing for her.

Matryona's brother-in-law wants to take half the house away to his married daughter's village; they must put up a house in order to get a piece of land.  Matryona is fine with this, but the whole operation is done cheaply and impatiently, and it ends in disaster.  As Ignatich ponders on Matryona's character, he realizes:

She never tried to acquire things for herself....She was misunderstood and abandoned by her husband, having buried six of his children.  Her moral and ethical standards made her a misfit.  She was considered 'odd' by her sisters and her sisters-in-law -- a laughingstock -- because, as they said, she was so stupid as to work for others without pay...We all lived beside her, and never understood that she was that righteous one without whom, according to the proverb, no village can stand.  Nor any city.  Nor our whole land.

Two good and effective stories that will give the reader some thoughts to chew on.


Comments

  1. BronaMay 10, 2022 at 2:47 AM

    I find I'm reading all my Russian books right now, with Ukraine in mind, looking for any little hint or suggestion about how things were and how they got to where they are now.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more