The acclaimed, award-winning author George Saunders has been teaching a class about the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University for the past two decades. Now he's transformed this class into a book called "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life."
The book features eight stories by such 19th century Russian masters as Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, along with Saunders' insightful essays about the stories. He describes the eight stories as "moral fables." He told WPR's "BETA" that these stories "speak to the kind of questions that keep us up at night: 'How should I live? Why is there death in the world? You know, what is love really?'"
"I just love them so much, and what I found over the years was if I was teaching something about which I felt enthusiasm, it always made for a better class," Saunders said. "We ended up getting into these beautiful moments where the distinction between teacher and class goes away, and we're just a bunch of writers trying to figure out how these stories work."
Saunders refers to the "physics" of a short story throughout his book. He says that he likes to use this word because before he became a writer, he was an engineer from a working-class background. As a result, he always viewed stories as entertainment. And he discovered over the years that the best way to think about short stories is to figure out where his mind is when he starts reading a story. At that point, the mind is empty.
"Then you read, even a paragraph, and suddenly you're inflected a little bit," he explained. "You've got some curiosity aroused, you've got some emotions aroused. So that's really the basis for how I write and read stories, is let's just treat it as an experience that we go into that inflects us and does something to us. We can look at it kind of diagnostically and say, 'Well, what did it do? Where did it do it? Was it positive or negative? And when I left the story, how was I changed relative to the guy who started it?'"
Saunders first encountered Chekhov's 1898 short story "Gooseberries" during his first semester as a student at Syracuse. His teacher, Tobias Wolff, was scheduled to do a reading on a snowy night. Wolff was feeling a little under the weather, so he decided to read some Chekhov instead of his own work.
"And it was just one of the most beautiful performances I've ever heard," Saunders recalled. "It was almost like Chekhov had materialized in the room."
This experience was a turning point in Saunders' life.
"It was just a moment when I went, 'Oh, yeah, this is what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life for sure. If I could do anything that even approximates the feeling that we had in that room, I would kill to do it, you know, let's get started.'"
On the surface, "Gooseberries" is a fairly simple story. It's about two men who are out hunting on a Russian plain. It starts to rain, so they seek shelter at the home of a friend who lives nearby. One of the two hunters tells a story that bores the other two men.
"His story is about a very kind of radical notion, which is that happiness is not actually good, that happiness is a form of decadence, that if I'm happy, it's because someone else, somewhere, has paid for it, you know, oppressing them," Saunders explained. "It's a story about the way that we all feel when everything goes right and when we do a little victory dance, and then we feel kind of guilty about it. You know, that kind of almost sugar buzzy feeling that comes from happiness, especially in a culture like ours where so many have so much and others have so little."
Saunders describes "Gooseberries" as "a living, breathing thing" that contradicts itself.
"It leaves the reader at the end saying, 'Wait a minute, is happiness good or not?' And the story goes, 'I know, right?' And then Chekhov leaves the stage. It's almost like Wile E. Coyote when he goes off the cliff, you know, he stands for just a second. For a second he's flying, you know, and then he's not."
"BETA" asked Saunders about the physics of his short story, "Sticks," from his short-story collection, "Tenth of December." The story is only 392 words long, yet it is very powerful. Saunders wrote the story back when he was still working as an engineer. He and his family had been going to a Lutheran church. There was a house that they would pass every Sunday that had a metal pole with a crossbar in the front yard. Somebody living in the house would decorate it every week. They'd put a ghost costume on it for Halloween and a helmet on it when the Buffalo Bills were playing.
"So I was going to write a story admiring that guy," Saunders recalled. "And when a first idea about a story comes to you, if you just turn it around 180 degrees, it's better. So in this case, I said, 'OK, I'm thinking about the positive qualities of doing something like that. What about the negative? What might that tendency be hiding or cloaking?'"
He wrote "Sticks" in one sitting and he doesn't think he did much rewriting. Saunders put it aside and 15 years later, he included it in "Tenth of December."
"And people have responded to it. I'm not really sure why. It was just literally an impulse and then a blurt. That doesn't happen too often, but it's always nice when it does."
One of the strengths of the Russian short stories that Saunders analyzes in his book is that they show us how "habitually judgy we are" and how the world we live in does not really support this position of strong judgment. Saunders says that our constant need to pass judgment makes us "morally smaller beings."
Saunders says he thought analyzing these short stories might make writing more difficult. He anticipated becoming more self-conscious while writing, but the opposite has happened. He said he is "so excited about the possibilities of the form."