Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol: how author George Saunders’ relationship with the written word changed after a deep dive into Russian literary giants’ short stories
- George Saunders meditates on reading and writing, how fiction works, and narrative in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his dissection of Russian short stories
- He read the seven tales ‘50, 100 times’ and, through writing his book, learned ‘how rewarding it is to pay attention to something relatively small, very deeply’
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life), by George Saunders. Random House
Part way through his essay on Leo Tolstoy’s Master and Man, George Saunders interrupts himself and says admiringly: “That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.
“But, Lord, it’s harder than it looks.”
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the 2017 Booker Prize winner’s new book, is a series of meditations on reading and writing, how fiction works, the short story form and the structures of narrative, built around a selection of 19th century Russian short stories from his course at Syracuse University, in upstate New York.
“What I learned writing this book was how rewarding it is to pay attention to something relatively small, very deeply,” Saunders tells me on Zoom from his “little basement dungeon” in Oneonta, a couple of hours’ drive from Syracuse.