On leaving Russia…

In these works, we see a transition in the way Russians perceive nature and their associations with it. Rather than nature as subsistence in the forest, an element to be combatted or a mother figure that both gives and takes, here the speakers and narrators remove themselves from Russia and find the kinder pastures elsewhere are more able to mirror their feelings and passions. But ever present in Russian works is the patriotism to the mother country, and this presents itself in the sadness that the narrators and speakers feel when separated from their country. In “Farewell to Russia,” this sadness of departing is tempered by the irritation of the speaker at the controlling state Russia has turned into. This distinction is clear as the speaker glories in his new freedom in Caucasus, “Far from slanderers and tsars, / Far from ever-spying eyes” (Lermontov, 76). While the speaker in this poem criticizes the government and the military (who support the government), he does not seem to criticize the land itself or the common peasant (unless they fit the category of “unwashed”—I personally took that to mean unclean in a moral way). Yet it is not until the speaker is exiled that he is able to find the peace equal to that in the skies above Caucasus.

Pushkin speaks of his love without naming its object. Yet given the speakers location in Georgia, in facing a foreign landscape, it is logical to connect his love not solely to a singular person, but rather his home of Russia. The river Aragva also acts to mirror the speaker’s emotions and is “murmurs” in an endless way, smoothing the river bed as the emotions wash over the speaker and slowly fade to an ever-present but almost unnoticeable susurrus. When the speaker laments, “For thus my heart must burn and love—because it’s true / That not to love—it knows no way,” his words are applicable to the love for which there is no tangible reason that most everyone feels for their home (Pushkin, 140). Yet this line also speaks to the oft felt love that follows the loss of that belatedly loved item. These poems and “Caucasus” are all moments when the speaker or narrator leaves his home and in travelling, finds that that which he has left behind holds an unexpected sway over the speaker/narrator.

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

A major theme that emerges from the readings this week is the idea of the Russian peripheries as distant lands filled with misunderstood and unappreciated natural purity. Tolstoy’s The Cossacks most strikingly reveals this through Olenin’s journey to the Caucasus mountains and his gradual attitude shift towards life in the empire’s periphery. Olenin’s friends initially question his decision to go to the Caucasus, saying that they themselves “wouldn’t do it for anything,” which reveals the important perspective the city dwellers have on these distant lands (7). While Moscow society is preoccupied with establishing one’s social status and speaking French, the periphery is viewed as undesirable (8). Olenin to some extent still embodies these characteristics at the start of his journey, as upon viewing the mountains for the first time he comments that “he could not find anything attractive in the spectacle of the mountains of which he had read and heard so much” (15). This is in line with Moscow society’s blasé attitude towards the periphery; however, Olenin’s attitude quickly changes the next day when he clearly sees the “enormous, pure white masses with their delicate contours, [as if it were an] apparition” (15-16). This marks a turning point for Olenin, where he starts to reject his city ways and embrace what the periphery has to offer.

Olenin’s embrace of natural purity makes him “quite a different man,” as he turns over a new leaf and adopts the Circassian way of life (48). Through his immersion in the majestic nature of the Caucasus mountains, he is reborn with more vigor than he ever had while living in Moscow (52). Olenin’s transformation critiques Moscow society while at the same time extols the splendor of the empire’s periphery that goes unappreciated by many. The Caucasus mountains serve as a physical, cultural, and societal escape from the Russian interior that Tolstoy brings to light through Olenin’s embrace of the land and its people.

Pushkin’s poem, Farewell to Russia, also touches on the interior peoples’ perspectives of distant Russian lands. What is most surprising by this poem is narrator’s mention of his “exile… beneath the Caucasian skies,” as it highlights how the Russian authority punishing him obviously viewed the Caucasus region as a vile punishment (5-6). The narrator, on the other hand, is greatly pleased to escape the undesirable conditions of the interior, which further emphasizes the varying interior perspectives of the periphery. To conclude, one question I have is whether those in the interior considered the empire’s periphery part of Russia, or more as foreign non-Russian regions?

The Dark Corner in Gogol and Raika

In Gogol and Raika, Shukshin depicts a universally relatable series of childhood memories, while also presenting the harsh, painful, and frightening realities of war-time life. First of all, the conversational form of the narration allows a heightened sense of connection between the reader and the narrator. It almost feels like a diary entry, in which the narrator reflects on these distinct childhood memories, but then, occasionally inserts his “present-day” self using parentheticals. In the first of many such parentheticals, the narrator remarks, “(To this day your heart shudders when you remember the live, quivering tug of the tow rope in your hands and the way it slaps against the water when it begins to ‘pull’).” The specificity of these details are such that only the narrator himself, or someone who has very similar experiences would entirely understand. Yet, having this level of intimate look into the narrator’s combined childhood and present-day thought-processes creates a strong sense of investment in the narrator for the reader. I assume the narrator is Ivan Popov, a fictional (?) character based off of Shukshin’s (though this is only an assumption and I might be completely off on that).

As the narrator progresses through his story, he does not follow a linear path. Rather, like in a conversation, or as in a diary entry, he weaves along a rather tangential path, until it all comes together for the most extreme of endings. We’ve read countless stories that end in one surprising, and often dark last paragraph; this seems to be a pattern.

I am interested in the connections between the various key images in this narrative. From the very beginning, we sympathize with and relate to the young boy who will do anything to read, and who cares so deeply for his cow Raika. As relatable and happy-spirited, and optimistic of a character Viy is, there is no shortage of dark and brutal imagery:  the starving “endlessly sad cow’s eyes,” the inescapable cold, the “anxious, terrible night,” (which takes place even in his fantasy for the future joyous spring), the image from “Viy,” of a woman “sitting up in her coffin,” and lastly, the cow “with her intestines hanging out of her belly.” All of these horrific images and fears seem to be contained in the ominous “dark corner,” which the narrator avoids when seated atop his stove, and yet conquers after an expedition with his mother.

Other remaining questions – the cow returns to her family to die – what do we make of this? What about the dog that scares his mother?

Cycles of Power and Cycles of Pain: Symbolism of the Peg Leg and Borzya in Shukshin’s “Harvesting”

Shukshin’s “Harvesting” recounts the exhaustive farm-work of a teenage boy under the abusive power of Ivan Alekseich, a fictitious chairman of a collective farm during Soviet Russia. This week’s blog post, inspired by last week’s class comments on the restrictive and communal nature of Soviet Russia, will thus attempt to analyze the symbolism of various images and scenes in Shukshin’s piece, such as Borzya’s visceral response to the chairman’s peg leg, and the chairman’s reaction to higher authority, i.e. the committee representative.

We are first introduced to interactions between the chairman and Borzya, the “infinitely good-tempered scamp of a dog,” when the chairman meets with his farmhands Sanka, Ilyukba, Vanka, and Vaska, to scold them each for their workplace laziness (Shukshin 231). Note that Borzya, instead of being introduced as the farm dog, is identified with the plural personal pronoun “our” (231). Already, we get a connotation of sharedness and communism that often goes hand-in-hand with descriptions of “the kolkhoz” during Soviet Russia. Even the dog, a seemingly unimportant character, is shared communally. That said, the part of this passage that I want to pay closest attention to is the moments amidst Alekseich’s berating of the four teenage workers when he notices his higher committee representative. Fear of the representative and his impromptu arrival propels the chairman out of his chair in order to demonstrate a more attentive and administrative demeanor. Recall that before the chairman began his scolding, Vanka reveals that the “chairman [Alekseich] is simply incapable of flying into a rage on demand” (231). Instead, Alekseich usually delivers a “wishy-washy,” indirect scolding (231). Beating-around-the-bush implies that Alekseich’s strict control is not initiated entirely by his own reactions and sentiments. If they were, their delivery would be more natural and succinct. Instead, his “wishy-washy” suggest uncertainty, especially since he often becomes distracted by independent, unrelated thoughts such as “the quails … [that] destroy all sorts of larvae …” (231). To me, this uncertainty implies that he himself represents a second-hand funneling of power from some other, more authoritative force. Perhaps, this force is the representative, for as soon as he enters, Alekseich “leap[s] to his feet,” and “start[s] banging his fist on the table and shouting” (231). Clearly, the prominence of the committee representative evokes a more aggressive and authoritative façade from Alekseich.

Furthermore, right after the sudden shift of Alekseich’s authoritative tone due to the representative’s arrival, we see the only interaction between Chairman Alekseich and the communal dog Borzya, specifically: the chairman’s trampling of Borzya’s tail, and his subsequent obliviousness to Borzya’s painful cries. Naturally, Alekseich’s peg leg and its inability to sense its position like a normal human foot would perfectly explains why Alekseich would not feel Borzya’s tail underneath him. However, what strikes me as odd is that even after Borzya “let[s] out an otherworldly howl,” the chairman still remains oblivious, and instead of realizing Borzya’s pain, “shout[s] over the dog” (232). Alekseich’s peg leg— and its lack of spatial senses—justifies his initial disregard of Borzya, the communal dog. However, Alekseich still fails to acknowledge Borzya after Borzya clearly expresses a perceivable vocal gesture. For a generally attentive chairman, that had even “caught sight of” Vanka after descent into the rye, I am surprised that he Alekseich remains undisturbed by Borzya (229). That said, I think this outright ignorance is purposeful on Shukshin’s part, as if to say that all sense and emotion is subservient to the perceptions of authority. The fact that the chairman cannot feel Borzya’s tail is understandable, but the fact that the chairman cannot hear Borzya’s cries conveniently while the chairman performs for the representative, suggests that another force is at work here—similar to how the unplanned and convoluted delivery of Alekseich’s scolding suggests the indirect authoritative force of the representative. Also, it is ironic how that in each of these cases, relaying of discipline comes indirectly: the committee representative never explicitly states anything to Alekseich, and Alekseich’s neither purposely steps on Borzya’s tail, nor does he directly nor fervently scold the four teenagers. However, when power is present, i.e. the committee representative, Alekseich becomes a completely different person that angrily scolds his workers and even potentially injures Borzya with purpose. And Borzya, this symbolic dog representing the ownership of the entire community, aimlessly writhes in pain. There is something ironic about the image of this dog biting at an animate peg and thus biting at his own tail. Further, this illustration of the Borzya, a conduit for the entire community, (if you will), biting his own tail, suggests a sense of self-sabotage that is almost comical, evidenced by a unanimous uproar by the peasants, “rolling on the ground with laughter” (233). As readers, we see an illustration of Borzya (the community), responding to oppressive authority (the chairman) who himself does not primarily harbor his own anger, but rather channels the sentiments of more superior authority (the committee representative). In sum, we are left with two cyclical processes: the funneling and subsequent magnification of power and control from high society down through local superiors in Soviet Russian, and the aimless self-sabotage that occurs when the masses fight back against this exponentially strengthened power and control.

In sum, I hope that my analysis, though up for extensive interpretation, lends meaning to some of the symbols in Shukshin’s “Harvesting—” specifically the working class community and its apparent entrapment beneath the “communist” yet obviously authoritative power chain. I personally believe that this reading of Shukshin’s piece could perhaps initiate a dialogue regarding the inextricable connection to power and authority in a society that is meanwhile run by and intended for public’s greater good.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Communal Living

Perhaps the biggest change to a peasant’s daily life after the revolution took place in Russia was the idea of living on worker’s collectives, complicated institutions where Russians would live and share the work as well as the profits communally. Both “Matryona’s Home” and  “Harvesting” shows the profound beauty of a simple and elegant life such as this, but they also show how easy this way of life is to overly-romanticize and how it frequently falls short of it’s ideals.

In “Harvesting”, the action of sleeping is described a lot more than one would normally expect in a plot-driven fictional short story like this, and it is described as full and peaceful. This shows the satisfaction of an honest days work, and the serenity of being in harmony with the Earth. “My blood hums pleasantly, then I’m out of my body swimming somewhere, and I experience a sensation of perfect bliss. It’s strange, but I am aware that I’m sleeping-I am consciously, sweetly asleep. The earth carries me swiftly along on her bosom, but I am sleeping, I know that. Never again in all my life have I slept like that-with my whole body, to my heart’s content, without measure.”

Even the dog feels this satisfaction of being a part of a working machine: “Far away, beyond the forest, the large red sun slowly sinks into the deep blue haze. It’s good here on earth, pensive, peaceful. Under the chairman’s table, Borzya, our infinitely good-tempered scamp of a dog, lies curled up, sleeping peacefully.” This quote is essential because it hows how beautiful and untroubled a moment in life can be. It implies that there can be a harmony between living things on earth, drawing on themes of bounty and plenty, arguing that there is plenty for all of us on ‘good earth’.

However this peaceful way of thinking about life is interrupted by the realities of a boss, Chairman Alekseich, fruitlessly trying to feed a starving nation by trying desperately to up the farm’s production and cracking down on insubordination to increase the efficiency. This shows the conflict reality has with this utopic lifestyle, and thus its frequent shortcomings.

This contrast between the moments of ‘bliss’ the workers experience, and the unwavering outside forces making this bliss largely impossible and unsustainable is also shown in “Matryona’s Home” in the difference between how the narrator expects Matryona’s life to be and how it actually is. It is clear that Matryona believes in the importance and dignity of her work, yet she still gets caught up in the dissatisfaction of the peasants and takes part in their destructive drunken revelry. And the narrator himself is shocked by the stink of the factories and harshness of the deforestation, as opposed to the peaceful Russian countryside he had pictured.

The Masquerading Modern

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Matryona’s Home” is an exhaustive description of an old peasant women Matryona and her way of life. The text is almost more ethnographical than it is plot driven and seems to work equally as the text of preservation as one of fiction. In small moments through Matryona, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the doomed eventual extinction of the rural peasant way of life.

In response to hearing a new technological invention on the radio, Matryona remarks, “New ones all the time, nothing but new ones. People don’t want to work with the old ones anymore, where are we going to store them all?” (456). Within industrialization, old technology is constantly being replaced by new, better, and more efficient machines.  If the end goal is the increased production of a commodity, there is no point in maintaining an old less efficient mode of production. Matryona, however, who belongs to a generation presumably before Russia’s industrialization questions the waste this constant innovation. To put it in idiomatic terms, Matryona is thinking in an “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mindset. Matryona herself has taken actions against the expansion of production. She does not own a cow in fear that it will consume more than she can provide. She does not manure the soil and consequently only has small potatoes. She works for free for the good of others without asking for pay. Matryona’s actions are not only anticapitalistic, but more specifically against development. Matryona cannot conceptualize the necessity for growth; instead, she is content with her simple extravagant life.

Solzhenitsyn follows Matryona’s comments on machines with comments on new and classic renditions on Russian folk-songs, highlighting her affinity to the old preindustrial Russia, and linking her way of life to the preindustrial. After listening to the modern Chaliapin cover of a folk song, Matryona comments, “’Queer singing, not our sort of singing.’ ‘You can’t mean that, Matryona Vasilyevna… Just listen to him’ She listened a bit longer, and pursed her lips, ‘No it’s wrong. It isn’t our sort of tune, and he’s tricky with his voice’” (456). Although masquerading behind a classic Russian tune, Chaliapin’s folk song is not Russian to Matryona. Instead, his rendition is “tricky,” deceiving the listener to seem as if it represents this rural identity. Matryona, however, sees through this disguise, and is disgusting at the semblance of the rural in the modern.

If I had more space, I would explore more themes of how Matryona combats aspects of modern Russian culture which camouflage in the rural identity.

Village Prose

Matryona’s Homestead differs from our readings in the past couple of weeks in that it goes further than the surface level and shifts the more apparent aspects of Russia that have changed (industrialization, deforestation, etc.) and explores more historical details, such as village life and culture. For me, Matryona represents the traditional villager of the time – hard working, never complaining, acting often out of selflessness – all despite her ill health and old age. Although she is deeply attached to her home and feels that it has supported her through much of her life, she follows suit of the drunken villagers and helps deconstruct her very own home. Matryona was a lovely woman yet her selfless acts were taken for granted and exploited by her fellow villagers, which follows with the fact that village life in that time was exploited and restructured by the ruling communist power.

Ignatich mentions that he wants to live in a peaceful and wooden part of Russia but is disappointed when he fails to find this on the collective farm school where he is assigned. Evident by the factory smokestacks polluting the air and the drunken villagers, and between the misuse of logging and wide-spread industrialization, the Russia he wanted seemingly no longer existed. Our theme for tomorrow’s class, fittingly, is “The village in Soviet prose of the Thaw period”. I did some research and found that village prose was a movement in Soviet Russian literature beginning during the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ (the decade following Stalin’s death where the Soviet Union experienced some freedom from the repression and censorship they experienced after the revolution), that focused largely on representing rural village communities and their struggle during this time.

Specific to village life, this traditional aspect of Russia was exploited and reorganized, but I get a sense in this piece that while many aspects of village life were forcibly changed, there is still a sense of community and traditional life that they are holding on to. This could be seen in the sustained selflessness and kindness of Matryona regardless of the exploitative villagers, or even more so in Vanya’s deep love for reading in Gogol and Raika. He writes that regardless of the hardships of winter, the coldness and hunger, he holds on to his one passion: reading books to his Mama and Talya. This is a small yet significant way of maintaining some sort of joy in a not-so-joyous time.

Sympathetic Cows

Both Shushkin’s “Gogal and Raika” and Platonov’s “The Cow” humanize cows, making them into martyrs for the starving Russian Peasants during political change and uncertainty.

The cow in “Gogal and Raika” is used as the name of the short story: Raika. She immediately becomes a sympathetic character when the speaker, after lamenting about spending short stints of time outside in the harsh Siberian winter, reminds the reader that “the cow’s out in the pen” (220). The cow is described as having “sad eyes” and an aura that once she has been seen “you feel no peace inside: here — poor and badly off though you may be — you can at least warm up, but she has to stand out there” (220-221). Raika’s freezing starvation could be compared to those exiled to the Gulags (This could definitely be a reach but Gulag and “Gogal,” from the title of the short story” are very similar sounding words). After the harsh winter, which the family barely survives, “Raika was no more… Raika arrived at our gate with her intestines hanging out of her belly, dragging along after her. She’d been run through with a pitchfork” (227-228). Raika was killed eating from a neighbors haystack so that she did not starve. 

The cow in Platonov’s story, “The Cow,” similarly has sympathetic human qualities, such as her “warm, dark eyes” and how she misses her son: “Our cow’s already crying!” (248, 259). When her son dies, the cow falls into an irreversible depression. Platonov includes a crucial difference between cow grief and human grief that makes her loss even more tragic: “She was unable to allay this grief inside her with words, consciousness, a friend or any other distraction” (255). This absolute hopelessness is similar to the hunger felt by Shushkin’s cow, and many peasants alike.

I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live long day

Examining the work animals present in “The Cow” and Cossacks of the Kuban can reveal many conceptualizations of the interaction with humans and nature at this period of Soviet rule under Stalin. In “The Cow,” the young Vasya and his father treat the cows as primarily work animals, valued for such actions, “He liked everything about the cow…her large, thin body which was the way it was because, instead of saving her strength for herself in fat and meat, the cow gave it all away in milk and work” (247-48). His father too appreciates the calf for the services rendered, asking rhetorically, “What do we want with a bull calf?” and thereby expressing his disdain for a male animal that is too young to work and can’t produce milk and therefore is best put to use as a source of meat and income (254). Of course, the animal is such the perfect worker that Platonov chooses it to represent the ideal of a communist worker, but the idea that even a cow could fill this role of labor and proffering more than it keeps for itself (and then being torn apart emotionally and then literally because of these sacrifices) suggests that Platonov and/or the Soviet regime view people as not that far off from animals and a source of pure labor above all else.

Similarly, in Cossacks of the Kuban, the main work animals are horses, bred both for racing and transport. The contrast in the beginning of the film between the horses and the oxen, the latter of which pulling a load of humans and watermelons and thus plodding along slowly but surely, emphasizes the difference between the beasts of pleasure and those of labor. The oxen are like the hardened peasants, used to a life of hard work, unlike the galloping horses that compete in races and carry the single individuals of prominence in their seemingly flighty, yet elegant ways.

The horse, the ox and the cow are both animals that have been domesticated through many years of labor on the human’s side and the result is a blending of these work animals and the working humans that employ them. I’d like to talk more about the cow’s death and the symbolism there of it dying on the railroad tracks, hit by a train and the symbolism of the horse race as the pinnacle of the drama of the two love stories, but I’m not 100% sure of my ideas (and what exactly they are) and would rather discuss them in class instead.

The Peasant Cow

A first reading of Platonov’s The Cow might lead one to believe that it simply depicts a sad situation for peasants that witness the slow decline and death of their only female cow on the collective farm. Upon closer examination, and considering the time and context in which this story takes place (likely 1938 or 1939), the text reveals the contemporary peasant condition through the cow’s behavior in a rapidly changing world. In other words, the descriptions of the cow better communicate what the peasants are experiencing during this time than the peasants themselves do.

At the beginning of the story, the cow is described as living alone in a shed in the countryside and having a bull calf of her own (247). Her world is quickly disturbed, as her calf is taken away by her owner peasant to receive treatment by a vet after falling ill (247). This act of taking her calf away, along with her described as giving all her strength for the purpose of producing milk and work, causes the cow to embody the attributes of an exploited peasant under the collective farm system present during this time in history (248). While the peasant boy, Vasya, appears to care for the cow, it is clear that the peasants value the cow just for the milk and work she produces. This especially comes to the fore when Vasya’s father returns without the bull calf, claiming that despite the calf having recovered, it was best to sell “him to the slaughterhouse” as a bull is of little value (254).  The cow, longing for the return of her calf, falls into a depressed mood, while the narrator describes her as “not understand[ing] that it is possible to forget one happiness, to find another and then live again, not suffering any longer” (255). One can extrapolate the description of the cow to the peasants of this time, as it reinforces the idea of the backwards peasant who cannot cope with the loss of their lives as they knew them before collectivization. While the authorities who imposed collectivization may have had the attitude that the peasant could simply forget what they loved in the past and embrace new forms of happiness, Platonov’s work makes it clear that this was not the case.

The cow’s death in the final section of the story highlights the tragedy of the peasant under collectivization. The image of the cow, unable to escape in time, struck by the train running down the line is powerful and evokes the sense that nothing can stop the peasant from in a sense being annihilated by political and industrial forces of the time (257). While the analysis of this ending scene could greatly be expanded, the engine driver sums up the condition of the peasants perfectly with this foreboding statement: “she was running away from the engine, but she was slow and she didn’t have the sense to get off the line… I thought she would” (257).