Short Stories on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Risa over at Breadcrumb Reads. This encourages the reading of short stories every week.
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This week I read two short stories from two Russian authors. The short stories I read were from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. The short stories were from the Best Russian Short Stories collection that was compiled by Thomas Seltzer, which is available as a free ebook at Project Gutenberg.
The short stories that I read are:
The Christmas Tree and the Wedding, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I must say that I really enjoyed this story by Dostoyevsky. The story is told by the narrator who gets invited to a Christmas party. The party was disguised as a children’s party but it was actually just a front for the hosting family to talk business with their guests.
The narrator, knowing no one but the host, retreats to a corner to observe the guests. This is where the story gets interesting as it displays Dostoyevsky’s talent for observation. He notices one guest in particular, Julian Mastakovich, that stood out for him and he observed rather closely. Apart from Julian, he also takes notice of one of the young female children. These group of people that he observes at the party also serve as the connection to another event he witnesses five years later.
I read the Introduction by Thomas Seltzer for this book and found some elements of this passage he wrote about Dostoyevsky in the story I just read:
In Dostoyevsky, indeed, the passion for the common people and the all-embracing, all-penetrating pity for suffering humanity reach their climax. He was a profound psychologist and delved deeply into the human soul, especially in its abnormal and diseased aspects. Between scenes of heart-rending, abject poverty, injustice, and wrong, and the torments of mental pathology, he managed almost to exhaust the whole range of human woe. And he analysed this misery with an intensity of feeling and a painstaking regard for the most harrowing details that are quite upsetting to normally constituted nerves.
I also liked the way Dostoyevsky describes his characters or how his characters feel about the other characters in the story. Like this feeling the narrator had for Julian, which gives you an idea of how the story will go:
There was another guest who interested me. But he was of quite a different order. He was a personage. They called him Julian Mastakovich. At first glance one could tell he was an honoured guest and stood in the same relation to the host as the host to the gentleman of the whiskers. The host and hostess said no end of amiable things to him, were most attentive, wining him, hovering over him, bringing guests up to be introduced, but never leading him to any one else. I noticed tears glisten in our host’s eyes when Julian Mastakovich remarked that he had rarely spent such a pleasant evening. Somehow I began to feel uncomfortable in this personage’s presence.
{Read online}
God Sees the Truth but Waits, by Leo Tolstoy. This is a story of a merchant, Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov, who is wrongfully accused of murder and gets sent to prison. The story presents itself as rather simple but it is quite heavy in other aspects. I think this post says it best:
This is a emotional story of acceptance and forgiveness — acceptance of the failings of yourself and others and the strength to forgive even when understanding is beyond your grasp.
{Read online}
