As I read “Night,” it became clear to me that I wasn’t reading a story about a series of logical events but rather a story about a series of emotional ones. If “The Nose” and “Heart of the Dog” are low grade fever dreams, then “Night” can be rated at a temperature of 107.
Half of my time reading “Night” was spent trying to figure out what the characters in the story were. “Mommy” is clearly some kind of maternal entity, and Alexei clearly is her son. And though Alexei acts very much in line with a child (begging for sweets and becoming endearingly rowdy at times,) his appearance suggests otherwise. He is described as having a “bald spot” on his head (curiously like “mommy”), “yellow” teeth, hairy hands, and a “disfigured face.” In addition, he seems to be capable of sudden fits of violence, as shown when he “trampled” on what seemed to either be the money pieces he stole or possibly even the people attacking him.
Despite his strangeness and the fact that the the writing frequently and convincingly reflects his manic, childish mind, I was made to feel pity for him. The feverish way he is depicted going through life and the way he falls victim to a cruel society without the protection of “Mommy” seem to both critique dependency and social injustice. The world he lives in is depicted as being terribly cruel, so cruel that Alexei seems to be doomed at the end of the story to scrawl “night” over and over as a perverse fulfillment of his dream of being a writer. Alexi seems inspired (or driven insane) by a bad experience, and this is heartbreaking.
I think it’s interesting to pull out the physical descriptions of Alexei and compare them to his actions as you’ve done. I think that this is meant to illustrate that he’s older physically, but has some sort of mental deficiency that keeps him acting as a child. This young child in an old man’s body is likely meant to represent either the soviet union itself or its people, illustrating the failure of the soviet union to grow into the promised utopia. I think this is also reflected in his dreams to become a writer, again, with the soviet union having these grand ideals and goals, only to fall short and only achieve a perversion of those goals.
Both of you bring up very interesting points. As we talked about in class today, Alexei is almost the personification of state dependency by the citizens of the Soviet Union. Requiring a protectorate, Mommy in this case, draws explicit parallels to the ‘homo sovieticus’ first brought about during “Heart of a Dog”, but ultimately rising to prominence during the time this piece was published. As both of you have mentioned, both characters’ looks are described, but the emphasis on Alexei’s disfiguration continues to add to this narrative.
I also found myself thinking back to “Heart of a Dog” while reading this text. I find it interesting how both stories have such similar structure as both involving a slightly disturbed main characters with a figure that they depend on. I wonder who to critique in this case if we are to understand these dependent figures as representations of the soviet people. Do we blame the crude and mad or do we blame those who brought about that archetype. The easier answer seems to be to blame the system, but in that case what was the “mommy’ character supposed to do different and how did she fail a child that was innately born with a disability.
What I find so off-putting about the cruelty Alexi faces is how it is not unique to the setting. The reaction shown to a man causing a commotion in the middle of the night, being chased into an alley, stomping on currency, shedding his clothes (“I’ll unbutton everything”), and charging at nearby women does not feel fundamentally different from how a crowd of people would react to a similar situation in most other cities. We are forced to ponder the manners in which our own social environments capitalize upon the dysfunction of people for whom we had a responsibility to nurture.
The two sets of comments here really point to Tolstaya’s brilliance in crafting this story: the fact that it works as both an allegorical commentary on the “madness” of the Soviet experiment, and also as a rather disturbing yet, as Zach says, believable story about the unfeeling and cruel treatment of a challenged human being by others in society. These two sets of meanings coexist powerfully in the story, and lend it its particular poignancy.