"Vanka" (1886)

This very short story by Anton Chekhov packs an emotional punch, which is likely as intended, published on Christmas Day in 1886. It's a letter written on Christmas Eve by a 9-year-old boy to his grandfather. The boy, an orphan, has been apprenticed to a shoemaker in Moscow, who may or may not be cruel but certainly he is a disciplinarian and impatient with foolishness. The boy is miserable. He wants out. He wants it so badly you can feel it through the page. As his circumstances and backstory are sketched in, it's evident that won't happen, and also his situation might not be as bad as he thinks. But that won't help him in the weeks and months ahead, because we already know something he doesn't. By addressing it only "To grandfather in the village, Konstantin Makaritch," the letter will never make it to his grandfather. All his hopes enclosed in that letter are in vain, we know even on this Christmas Eve, but the boy will suffer through diminishing hope and a sense of abandonment all winter. It's poignant and well done, and in Russia, according to Wikipedia, it even contributed a figure of speech: "the village, to grandfather" refers to mail sent in such a way that it will never be received. I'm not sure why I have such confidence that the boy will be all right with the shoemaker. A fair number of 19th-century storylines involve the ill treatment of orphaned apprentices. By the boy's account he's not treated that well by the master, but it reads more like junior-high teachers I remember getting impatient with me or others and snapping. A 9-year-old is still a handful. And I feel for this boy. The story reminded me of going to summer camp when I was 11 or 12, which was bad enough, being away from home for nearly two weeks. But then we went on a miserable canoe trip, in the sweltering dog days of August, with portages and other outrageous creature discomforts. I found myself utterly desolate one late night at about 4 a.m., huddled up in a stuffy pup tent with two others. They were sleeping but I could not, had not been able to all night. I crawled out of the humid canvas space thinking I might find relief at last from a nagging constipation, only to find instead a creepy orange-light vibe and all the stall doors removed in the outbuilding bathroom facilities. I felt like I was in hell. The bugs were really bad too and I was afraid of seeing someone at that hour. That's the kind of misery I feel coming from this boy, and I sympathize. But I also know I was back home within days and things were back to normal. For this boy, however that's not what's going to happen. Great story, all done in the boy's voice.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

His Promised Land (1886)

John P. Parker's slave narrative was never actually published until 1996, but editor and historian Stuart Seely Sprague makes a thorough and painstaking job of it. Parker was a freed slave as of 1845, at the age of 18, who worked out of Ripley, Ohio, "running off" Kentucky slaves by way of the Underground Railroad. Twenty years after the Civil War the reporter Frank M. Gregg tracked him down and interviewed him. Gregg's interest was primarily in verifying the factual basis for the Eliza scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which involves a young woman escaping with her baby across the melting ice of the late-winter Ohio River. Slaveholders and other Southerners took an interest in debunking it as implausible, but Gregg wanted to prove it. Parker died in 1900. His narrative had to go unpublished in his lifetime because of the danger the story represented to himself and family, both legally and personally. It's harder to say why it went unpublished for nearly a century after his death, but the reasons are not hard to guess: lack of interest as African-American liberation was replaced by Jim Crow laws and Confederacy memorials. Still, Parker may be the single most heroic figure in all these slave narratives, smart, brave, and committed to freedom. "Freedom" has become a dangerously inapproximate word these days, but in Parker's case it's pretty clear: "freedom" means freedom from enslavement. As always, the details of the context—notably the high value of slaves—contributes to understanding the difficulty of ending it once it had become an institution. As always, there is the mystery of seeing Americans accept it so readily, often aiding the slaveholders rather than the slaves. Parker's story is fragmented because of the way it made it into print. Some sections are simply missing. But it also contains some of the most exciting scenes in slave literature, with anecdotes of amazing adventures. They are too short and there are not enough of them, but they will do. Parker earns his bona fides and then some here as a genuine American hero. He did not have to stay in Ripley and help runaway slaves. As a shrewd and successful businessman, with several patents to his name for metalworking inventions, he could have stayed in Ripley and let the runaways see to themselves. But he did not. Partly out of hatred for slavery and slaveholders, partly for the thrill of what it involved, he spent his nights for years on exceedingly dangerous work. We still need more like him.

In case it's not at the library.

The Princess Casamassima (1886)

I'm really not sure what to make of this strange, overlong Henry James novel, which takes on radical 19th-century European Marxist activists in much the same way his previous novel, The Bostonians, took on radical 19th-century Massachusetts feminism. It is interesting to see James make the attempt at relevance, for lack of a better term, but ultimately they are merely Henry James novels with the topicality slathered on like frosting. The Princess Casamassima is rich with character and story but somewhat short on insight. In the end, as he must, by his own inclinations, James slip-slides into apologist for the existing order, making out the mass of activists as benighted buffoons, well-meaning but stupid, or in some cases unpleasantly cunning and a little bit psychopathic. It's interesting to see the degree to which James was aware of the world around him, even if his disdain for it is all too plain. Hopefully this is the end of such experiments and we will be returning once again shortly to interiorities. At the same time, I must say there's something very affecting about the way he chooses to resolve this one—for me it ended up being worth the slog. Much of the first half is backstory, and the thing is positively dense with characters. None of them, save the victim at its center—the humble bookbinder Hyacinth Robinson, whose story it is more than the princess, who arrives remarkably late for a title character—has any particular focus or chemistry one with another, but they are reasonably interesting studies of European types. Perhaps that is another problem with this and The Bostonians—the usual tensions between Americans and Europeans are virtually absent. Where The Bostonians takes place in America and is about Americans, in The Princess Casamassima it is all Europe—London, mainly—and Europeans. Even at this long date, my political sympathies lie to the left of James, so occasionally I grew impatient with his hard-headed "common sense" characters, who assert that focusing on poverty and human rights is a silly waste of time because shut up. And the melodramatics of the plotting here are frequently embarrassed by overly exposed joints. Still, I was impressed by the way it ends. Worth keeping around for a rainy day.

"interlocutor" count = 13 / 608 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library.

The Bostonians (1886)

This is about as weird for Henry James as anything I've read by him yet. For one very obvious point, it is set entirely in the New World, with barely a reference to Europe. It involves a post-Civil-War Southern aristocratic gentleman, baying packs of Boston feminists, and a family of professional frauds. It is as exaggerated and distorted a view of 19th-century American society as could be constructed, I sense, based on what else I know. Once acclimated to the strange scene in this novel I found at least one unsettling bent toward my own sympathies. But James is not particularly taking a position. This is more like a Tom Wolfe novel a century too early. He is mocking and skewering it all—the level of contempt itself is bracing. Thus, for every jab I enjoyed that he took at the South in the person of Basil Ransom (whose name I kept perversely reading as Basil Rathbone), I had to wince and take issue when he attempted to make the feminists seem silly, willfully misunderstanding in order to dismiss them. By today's standards, James is the one who looks silly, with his witless intimations of lesbianism and generalized sexual frustration, or female hysteria. His hollow, belated appreciation of one of these feminists just feels insincere. In all this, there is also one of the more inane romances ever conducted via the cloak of a novel of manners. The concluding chapters dither about senselessly, with the worst symptoms of serialization in some ways. Only the throwaway very last sentence of the last paragraph finally delivers anything like a resolution. But because The Bostonians is a farce there is no resolution, nor can be. The greatest interest here for me was more historical, dredging up some sense of 1870s Boston as a focus of progressive / liberal / radical social change, analogous to San Francisco a century later. Many of the feminists' most basic priorities, such as the right to vote, seem now to have no argument whatsoever against. So it's interesting also to attempt to parse out some "common sense" view that would exclude it, which surfaces here, not just via the Southern gentleman Ransom, who himself more or less still demurs on the issue of slavery, let alone his views on women, but also embedded within the balancing tone of the third-person narrator, our authority of last resort. Interesting, but weird.

"interlocutor" count = 4 / 250 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

I'm not real high on this one, for reasons perhaps good and bad both. I never formed any appreciation of Robert Louis Stevenson. That's probably a big part of it. Even as a kid I was left cold by Treasure Island. And that probably would have been that for me but for Stephen King's Danse Macabre, which included Jekyll and Hyde on short lists of essentials, along with Dracula, Frankenstein, etc. Dracula was a disappointment (the tiresome epistolary structure mostly, though it had a few chilling ideas and moments) and that was enough to put me off some of the others until now. But alas. There is a very interesting idea in the middle of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, with its proto-Cronenberg scenarios of cooking chemicals and altered flesh—body horror—not to mention the unsettling undertow of anticipatory inchoate Freudian theory, the battle of the ego (Jekyll) and id (Hyde)—even the names are weirdly parallel, though decades early. There is a good opening scene, with Hyde making a remarkable first appearance trampling a little girl, and isolated moments, and of course it's all quite moody—London fog, dirty dark streets, the pestilential city, so on so forth. But the writing often seems disjointed, rambling, off the point or actively hiding the point. An envelope to be opened only on the death of one character contains an envelope to be opened only on the death of another. Really? There are altogether too many sealed envelopes, legal documents, street directions, letters, and notes in this short novel. I don't mind epistolary (I adore Les Liaisons Dangereuses), but at the same time, to my parochial modern ear, the narrative strategy has something of a higher bar to clear. One interesting point, in this arguably debased era of the Hulk, is that Dr. Jekyll is much the more robust, healthier, and larger of the two. Hyde is a bit of a homunculus. Otherwise his description is minimal except in terms of its effects on others, who of course are revolted and repulsed to a one. Stevenson also shows many of them mystified as to why Hyde has this effect on them, which is a nice and interesting detail, as though the revulsion were instinctual, taking place at brainstem levels beyond consciousness. I like that. But too much of this to my taste is about solving the mystery of the legal estate(s) of Jekyll and Hyde. There's something wild going on here and we're looking at dry documents.

In case it's not at the library.