May’s story is Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” (1895), the longest of the seven Russian stories that George Saunders contemplates in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which Bill and Bron and I will read in the next couple of weeks and discuss mid-month. (The project details are below.)

Tolstoy is the Russian writer with whom I’m most familiar, which only means that I’ve read War and Peace and Anna Karenina (and long ago enough that I recently confused a secondary plotline in one, misremembering it as belonging in the other, and my article went to through the editorial process with the error intact, so I’m not alone in being unfamiliar with these classics).

When it comes to these Russian writers, I feel like a beginner. But one book I have wanted to read for—well, for a very long time—is Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries. It’s embarrassing to figure how long I have had this volume unread, how much it has likely cost to pack and shift this massive book every time I’ve moved house over the years.

It’s easily the biggest book in my collection: she began keeping a diary when she was eighteen, shortly after her marriage in 1862, and continued until one month before her death in 1919. The reference material in the back could be a book on its own.

I suppose I have been waiting for the “right time”. I suppose that means I have been waiting to more fully understand the time and place in which she wrote. But, in fact, her diaries themselves could be an excellent way to get acquainted with the eras and environs: I’m scribbling down this project for October (when her diaries begin).

Meanwhile, the index reveals this passage for Tolstoy’s “Master and Man”, as well as some pages of footnotes, which indicate that the emotional turmoil that Sophia describes was severe enough for her to consider suicide. Leo Tolstoy writes about it in a letter and, later, in his own diaries, not only declaring that Sophia’s jealousy had no basis, but arranging for his work to be published as she had wished.

“Either I have a bad character or I am being perfectly reasonable. Lev Nikolaevich wrote a marvellous story called ‘Master and Man’. Now that scheming half-Jewish Gurevich woman is always buttering him up and trying to inveigle him into sending her things for her magazine. Since he now refuses to accept money for his writing, he might as well have had it published in a cheap little Intermediary edition: that way everyone would have got a chance to read it, and I would have understood and sympathised. He wouldn’t give it to me for Volume 13, so that I wouldn’t get any money for it; but why then did he give it to Gurevich? It has made me furious, and I am now trying to find a way to make amends to the public, not to benefit Gurevich but to spite her. And I shall find a way too.”

It’s a sad diary entry, but it does make me want to read “Master and Man”, to see if I too think it “marvellous”. Just flipping through Sophia’s diaries, Chekov and Turgenev seem to be everywhere—other books and lots of music too. Even a few mentions of Canada (it seems that a family member might have settled here). The endnotes could be a project in and of themselves, it seems—with references to lots of later scholarship on the Tolstoys. This story is the longest in Saunders’ book by far, but it barely rates a mention in Sophia’s record.

Her diaries and letters also inspired the French film, A Couple (2022), directed by Frederick Wiseman. The portions of her work that he originally selected would have made the film about four hours long, but he winnowed it down, until the work was about one hour of monologues. Filmed in a friend’s garden off the coast of Brittany in the springtime, it feels like an absolutely beautiful—but sad—immersion into another time and place.

One of the characters in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel Theft is also reading a Tolstoy story and, because I am convinced that the books in my stacks have their own private agreements, I figure it must be this very story that Saunders discusses next.

Gurnah has Karim ask Badar (two men of different classes): “How do you think the story will end? Will he die from a disease no one can diagnose? Perhaps one he has stubbornly brought on himself? Or will the servant bring him back to health in some way? What do you think?”

See, doesn’t it seem as though he’s channelling Saunders? With these questions about readers’ expectations and predictions? I don’t know if that’s the case, but the Tolstoy reference alone felt timely.

Links to the earlier stories are on the project page and the next three stories are listed below.

Anton Chekhov “In the Cart” 1897 (February) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Ivan Turgenev “The Singers” 1852 (March) Trans. David Magarshack
Anton Chekhov “The Darling” 1899 (April) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Master and Man” 1895 (May) Trans. Louise Mude and Aylmer Maude
Nikolai Gogol “The Nose” 1836 (June) Trans. Mary Struve
Anton Chekhov “Gooseberries” 1898 (July) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Alyosha the Pot” 1905 (August) Trans. Clarence Brown