The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy

It’s been a long time since I read much Tolstoy. Apart from rereading Anna Karenina about ten years ago, I haven’t picked up his work since leaving university. I was always more attracted to the darker psychology of Dostoevsky and the proto-surrealism of Gogol. However, as I get older, I’ve come to appreciate Tolstoy more, and it was nice to read a collection that mixed stories I’d encountered before with ones I read for the first time.

This particular collection contains four stories, which I’d classify as novellas or short novels with the exception of Master and Man, which I suppose you would call a short story (such descriptions are more about pacing and tone than actual word count anyway). In addition to its differing length, Master and Man is also the oddball of the four in terms of its subject matter, as the three other stories all deal in some way with unhappy marriages (something of a recurring theme for Tolstoy, who had a famously unhappy marriage of his own).

Of these, Family Happiness explores the theme most overtly, dealing as it does with a young woman who marries and older man only to have her expectations gradually wither. Interestingly, the book is written from the woman’s perspective and is very much on her side. Her husband is not made out as a villain—Tolstoy’s characters are too psychologically complex for such easy characterization—but sympathies lie more with her as the younger, more naïve party who believed an impossible dream and watched it buckle under the weight of reality.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is the best story of the four, and though unhappy marriage is a theme, the focus is ultimately on Ivan’s growing sense of mortality, and his fear not just of dying, but of dying after having lived his life so pointlessly. Praskovya, his wife, is not entirely sympathetic, but there was a humanity in her flaws that felt like a real person rather than a caricature. When her husband falls ill, she treats as either an uncooperative patient or a deliberate nuisance, by turns discounting his pain and chastising him for not doing more to treat it. Her lack of sympathy is harsh, but feels real, reflecting the weight illness puts on the caregiver as well as the sick.

The Kreutzer Sonata is the most Dostoevskyian of the four. It is written as the extended confession-cum-manifesto of a bitter and cynical man who killed his wife after believing her unfaithful (all we know for sure is that she was sitting at a table with another man; whether more was going on I’m not sure). The killer is wistful but unrepentant, seeing his act as necessary but blaming himself for causing it—not by being the murderer, but by “defiling” his wife through marriage and intercourse. He’s a weird dude.

Master and Man is the most tender story, and significantly the only one where a marriage doesn’t feature prominently. The relationship is instead (as the title implies) between a lord and his servant. Impious and greedy, the wealthy landowner Vasili Andreyevich Brekhunov travels through a snowstorm in an effort to beat his competitors to a land deal he believes will be very profitable. On his wife’s assistance, he brings the peasant Nikita with him. Nikita knows he is underpaid by his master but lacks other options. Despite feeling forced to work for him, Nikita is loyal to Vasili and does his best to serve him well. When their sledge gets trapped in the snow and Nikita begins freezing to death, Vasili shows selflessness in covering him with his body. IN lesser hands the story would feel hackneyed, but Tolstoy gives a rich reading of the inner lives of both men, ultimately justifying the action.

Overall, a solid collection of Tolstoy’s work.

The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers

They always say you should write what you know, but The King In Yellow is a great example of why that is, in certain cases, terrible advice.

A book of ten short stories published at the end of the 19th century, The King In Yellow opens with a suite of tales that would help mold weird and macabre fiction for decades to come. Lovecraft read them. Bram Stoker read them. Even if they aren't remembered directly by that many readers, their impact is palpable.

The first story in particular, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a force to be reckoned with. It reminded me a little of Phillip K Dick, not in style or content, but it the sheer overflowing of ideas. It takes place in an imagined future 1920s, but rather than making the setting the focus of the plot, it is almost incidental. It is in this story that we first hear mention of the eponymous King in Yellow, a play of such rhetorical power that reading it drives people mad (its influence as a literary device on Lovecraft's Necronomicon is indisputable). But this, too, is not truly core to the plot, which hinges on an unreliable narrator and his relationship with an eccentric old hermit, who has cast him in a atrangexdelusion of American dynasties.

The next three stories all share a common mythos despite varying in setting and style somewhat, and the first half rounds out with a ghost story that, while not especially original, is still engaging and well told.

It's in the second half that things take a turn. The next couple of stories become less macabre than simply odd, their weird fiction trappings conveyed more in atmosphere than plot. And then the last vestiges of the paranormal trappingsfall away, and we get stories that are mere slices of life in turn of the century Paris. “The Street of the First Shell” at least has some literary richness, focusing on the travails of the idealistic bohemian subculture in a besieged Paris during the Prussian War. At this point we've heard at least four stories about American painters in Paris—of which Robert Chambers was himself one—but each one has had something else to offer, some unique spin or take.

And then there's “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields.” I've never had a story in an otherwise solid collection squander so much of my good will. I just finished reading it and I couldn't tell you who the characters were or what happened, while I could chart out “The Repairer of Reputations” from memory almost line by line. Nothing whatsoever happens, and the trope of the American abroad, worn thin already, has absolutely nothing else to lean on, and so falls apart. The prose remains rich and eloquent, but good writing can only get you so far if the characters are bland and the story’s a dud, and I’m afriad both of these were the case here. The last story further tread this ground, though with a bit of intrigue to carry the reader along.

While uneven, the book still deserves its place in the proto-horror canon, if only for the first few stories, which are worth the price of admission.