Isaac Babel’s My First Goose is a very interesting short story highlighting the acceptance of a new propaganda officer into a Cossack regiment. When the narrator arrives, he is struck by Commander Savitsky’s size. While the commander gives the narrator a hard time, making fun of his glasses and calling him a ‘mama’s boy’, the majority of the harassment he receives comes from his peers—those in the sixth division of equal rank to the narrator. When reading Pravda, Lenin’s announcements for the day, he becomes too distracted and commands an old, blind woman to make him food. She voices her discontent with the Cossacks, saying all of this makes her want to kill herself. He shouts an expletive at her. Then, he accidentally kills a goose on the street in a very gory fashion, shouting another expletive at the now brainless and dead goose.

Interestingly, this causes the narrator’s peers to stop messing with him, one claiming that he will “fit in with us”. They even sleep together. Thus, an overreaction, a byproduct of the narrator’s rage, wins the Cossacks over. Judging by his awe of the Commander’s size in the beginning and distractedness in reading Lenin, one would think the narrator would be content with this new acceptance. However, the last line of the story is very important in proving the contrary. While the narrator, “saw women in my dreams”, a superficial ‘win’ for him, like the killing of the goose, “my heart, bloodstained from the killing, whined and dripped misery”, alluding to more structural discontent and shamefulness.

After reading the selected poets for Wednesday’s class, I was particularly drawn to Akhmatova because of how effectively she communicates her messages. Her poems are much easier to read and flow nicely, especially when compared to the other poets. For example, “I taught myself to live simply” was a poem that particularly struck me because of the time we are living in now. Her personification of worries in the first stanza emphasizes her active role in living more simply; needing to walk every night to tire them out is a powerful way to describe this coping mechanism. Her description of what I presume to be autumn in the second stanza is also very moving. The rustling of burdocks and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster is a beautiful description of the setting in which she writes. However, to Akhmatova, this is about life’s decay and beauty, not her immediate surroundings. She finishes the poem with a powerful line about hearing birds land on her roof occasionally, claiming besides that, it is so quiet she would not hear a knock on her door. The way she writes makes it clear how she taught herself to live simply.

“Sleeplessness” continues the trend of inviting the reader to resonate with her. The first stanza describes the onset of this, as she “catch the distant sound of footsteps. Your words lullaby me well, they haven’t let me sleep for three months!” The slow approach of the trouble with sleeping, personifying it, gives the reader something to relate to. When she exclaims, “You’re with me, with me again sleeplessness!”, it almost portrays the frustration with the inability to sleep. She knows its motionless face, that of an individual lying still in bed but not able to start dreaming. The stream of consciousness she presents makes this poem, like many of her other works, very relatable. Akhmatova’s simple word choice but intense image formation, through various literary techniques, gives readers of her poems a way to relate in a capacity that other poets cannot.

When browsing through the selected painter and artists, I was particularly struck by Kustodiev and his story. Aside from overcoming the debilitating tuberculosis and remaining mentally optimistic, his paintings captivated me because of their busy nature and distinctness. Interestingly, Kustodiev painted both an artist’s and a merchant’s wife, but the divergence of expression for a seemingly identical subject was, for me, noteworthy. Firstly, I was struck by the difference in pallet of the two paintings. The artist’s wife sits in a darker frame with some flora behind her. She is wearing a dark gown, but both the dress and the setting around her have some accents of lighter colors. There appears to be some smudging of paint, especially in the background, but more deliberate brush strokes are also visible in the linear parts of the illustration (the railings, dog’s limbs, and table cover).

The picture of the merchant’s wife is very antithetical to the artist’s. The setting is much more ornate: her dress is more sophisticated; the bowl and chalices being used are very elaborate; the food she is eating is clearly expensive, and the background is much more active. Additionally, she is not making eye contact with the viewer while the artist’s wife was.

The striking distinctions between the portraits of the wives must indicate how Kustodiev feels about the two classes. The artist’s wife, and by extension the artist, is much more pensive and introspective. Despite the dog looking at her, she maintains visual contact with the viewer. She is lightly smirking, but the mundane around her elicit a sense of relaxation and thought in her. The merchant’s wife, on the other hand, is looking off to the side. She is clearly much more captivated by what is going around her—the delicious food, pretty background, and happy cat have her attention. Her demeanor and way of holding the item in her hand illustrate her bliss and almost carefreeness, juxtaposing the pensive and thoughtful artist’s wife. I do not think he is criticizing either, but Kustodiev is definitely drawing a distinction.

The beginning of Blok’s A Puppet Show lays the foundation for Pierrot’s romanticism of Columbine, his supposed bride. The three mystics contribute to this dramatization, their back and forth dialogue of one-liners gives the reader, and more so the in-person viewer of the play, a sense of suspense before her ultimate appearance. The author’s interjections provide a brief sense of relief for the reader, but interestingly, these breaks are significantly shorter than build-up by the three mystics and Pierrot. While this gives us a sense of a break, its brief nature does not allow us to fully reset. Finally, the mystics proclaim Columbine arrives and Pierrot leads her to the center of the stage. The Chairman warns Pierrot that death has arrived, but Pierrot scoffs at the advice, minimizing the concern as fantasy. Even the author is in agreement, exclaiming that likening her braids to a scythe is defamation. Pierrot ironically says that he is either “an unfortunate madman”, or that he is “misunderstood”. It turns out he was in fact unfortunate, and the youthful Harlequin steals Columbine from him; Pierrot results to sulking.

What made the build-up to this climax significant was its avoidable nature. Pierrot was blinded by the prospect of uniting with Columbine, so infatuated with the idea of her that he refused to listen to others. He was self-aware of his controversial position, noting he was “alone” in his opinion. However, as everyone around him warned the hopeless romantic, he let his appearance distort the true reality.