Children of Gebelaawi – Naguib Mahfouz

“Our plague is forgetfulness.”

To think that an attempt was made on Naguib Mahfouz’s life for writing this book is beyond ridiculous. It shows that those who want to shut up books aren’t really bothered with actual offensive material but react to perceptions of insult to their ideology in a world in which they are becoming increasingly outdated and irrelevant, hence all this mindless sensitiveness.

As to the novel itself, I had a hard time with its two-dimensional characterisations and insufficient conflict. We have a brutal world headed by Gebelaawi, the timeless arch-ancestor of the human settlement who fathered and brought into world various tribes, and who lives in seclusion in the grand house shielded by everyone and everything, ruling his estate – the world – in absentia. God in other words, or the Abrahamic idea of it.

The story revolves around the struggle between his succeeding generations modeled on various Biblio-Quranic figures such as Abel and Cain, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, who were chosen to be sent to their tribes when the human condition became intolerably dark. Mahfouz leaves us in ambiguity as to whether the prophets were actually chosen by Gebelaawi or whether they came to believe in their station by some extraordinary natural agency that set them apart from the sheeple.

The same story repeats itself like a broken record. Every reform movement descends into the chaos as soon as the leader of the tribe turns his back on the temporary abode that is the world. It is as though Mahfouz is saying that nothing ever changes; things do not get better for ever; evil overpowers good at the first opportunity. One prophet comes, fixes things, gives people a simulacrum of justice and happiness, only for them to go back to fighting, killing, pillaging, and the oppression and injustice that comes with the abuse of power. Might the implied failure of various leaders have caused offence to the deranged extremists living in a perfect golden age of their imagination? Who knows eh.

I mentioned its lack of subtlety above, but I’m tempted to see the narrative voice as imitating the Quranic storytelling told in dry, exhortative, repetitive, fear-inducing tones for maximum effect. The good and evil are portrayed in absolute terms even though the prophets are brought down from their infallible station in myth to the level of humanity with their personal flaws. We do have room to see it as ironical. This is a promising idea for a story superimposed on the historico-mythical figures, only if Mahfouz had handled it with more tact. But there’s no mistaking what he’s getting at:

I myself have seen this wretched state of affairs in our own day – a faithful reflection of what people tell us about the past. As for the bards, they tell only of the heroic times, avoiding anything that could offend the powerful, singing praises…and celebrating a justice we never enjoy, a mercy we never find, a nobility we never meet with, a restraint we never see and a fairness we never hear of.

 

First published in Arabic 1959
Reviewed February 2016

 

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For a long time I could not find words to write anything on One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Marquez mesmerised me into a silence I didn’t know how to break. But I have been commenting here and there on Goodreads and now it is good time, finally, to gather my thoughts in one piece. But this somewhat longer review is more a labour of love than a coherent attempt to review his opus.

Marquez resets the history of universe such that the old reality ceases to exist and a new parallel world is born in which things do not conform to obsolete, worn-out laws. Everything in this world is to be discovered anew, even the most primary building block of life: water. Macondo is the first human settlement of Time Immemorial set up by the founding fathers of the Buendia family. It is a place where white and polished stones are like ‘prehistoric eggs’; an infant world, clean and pure, where ‘many things lack names.’ And it is natural that here, in the farther reaches of marshland prone to cataclysmic events, the mythscape of One Hundred Years of Solitude should come into existence.

The tone of this epic and picaresque story is set ab initio. Take a gander at this:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

It is not long before fateful human activity mars the innocent beauty of creation. The more they discover the more they are sucked into the inescapable cycle of life. The primordial myth that moulds and shapes their destinies does not let them advance in their efforts to defeat the infernal solitude of existence, whatever they might do, however they might try. History gets back at them again and again and every generation is but a repeat of the past. It is to emphasise the cyclical nature of time, in my opinion, that names of principal characters are repeated in every generation, sometimes to the confusion of the reader, easily rectified by going back to the family tree provided in the start of the book.

An external, portentous, disastrous, evil-like power guides and transforms the lives of people in the hamlet of Macondo. The sense of foreboding pervades the whole story: the rain continuing for many days and inundating the streets, the unceasing storm before the arrival in town of a heraldic character, and the fearful episode when townspeople begin to suffer a terrible memory loss, so that to remember the names and functions of things they write it down on labels and tie those labels to objects like chairs and tables. It tells us that we cannot hope for a future if our past is erased from the slates of our collective consciousness. Past may be a burden but it is also a great guiding force without which there’s no future.

The only way to retain your sanity is to remember your history and cling to it, or prepare to go insane. When one Jose Arcadio Buendia loses the memory of things, he goes mad:

“Jose Arcadio Buendia conversed with Prudencio Aguilar until the dawn. A few hours later, worn out by the vigil, he went into Aureliano’s workshop and asked him: “What day is today?” Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. “I was thinking the same thing,” Jose Arcadio Buendia said, “but suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too.” On the next day, Wednesday, Jose Arcadio Buendia went back to the workshop. “This is a disaster,” he said. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.” That night Pietro Crespi found him on the porch, weeping for…his mother and father. On Thursday he appeared in the workshop again with the painful look of plowed ground. “The time machine has broken,” he almost sobbed,…he spent six months examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.”

The town is threatened when the change taking place in the outside world begins to spill over into Macondo. Here we have a metaphor for the struggle of Maruqez’s native country and continent which is passing through internecine wars on its way toward externally imposed modernity. Divisions that hitherto did not exist come to define the inhabitants of Macondo and of towns farther afield. One of the Buendias, Colonel Aureliano, takes up a piece of metalwork as new and strange as a gun to mount a revolt and bring the promised glory to his land. New lines are drawn. New alliances are made. Old friends become enemies and enemies, partners. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, when he is about to kill him, tells General Moncada:

Remember, old friend, I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you.

The scene above captures the mechanistic element of their revolutionary war; the one below bares the meaninglessness of the conflict, so pertinent to the 20th century militarisation of the whole continent and its endless armed strife led by colonels and generals of all hues and shades.

Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?”
What other reason could there be?” Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. “For the great Liberal party.”
You’re lucky because you know why,” he answered. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.”
That’s bad,” Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. “Naturally,” he said. “But in any case, it’s better than not knowing why you’re fighting.” He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:
Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone.”

Although I tried to avoid getting into this discussion, but a review of this work is not possible without throwing in the inevitable buzzword – magical realism. Although the book gets high praise from most readers, it is to be expected that some readers would take a disliking to the basic ingredients from which Marquez draws his style and narrative devices. I want to address in particular one argument from the naysayer camp that pops up again and again: it is not realistic; it can’t happen; this is not how things work. So I ask (and try to answer): what is it with our obsession with “realism” that makes some of us reject the conceptual framework of this novel?

Aristotle in Poetics argues that a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The stress is not on what can physically happen but on mimetic persuasion. This is why some novels that follow every bit of convention, every bit of realistic element in them turn out to be unbelievable stories with unbelievable characters. You want to forget them as soon as you finish the book – and toss it aside. But on the other hand Greek tragedies populated with cosmic characters pulling suprahuman feats continue to enthrall generations of readers. How realistic are those stories? It is the writer’s task to convince us that this could have happened in a world he has created and set the rules for. In that Marquez is more than successful, and this is the basis of the enduring appeal of this work.

The distinction fell into place for me when I replaced ‘realism’ with ‘truth.’ Kafka’s haunting stories are so far from the 19th century convention of realism we have come to accept as the basis of novel-writing. His The Metamorphosis is not a representation of likely human activity (how could a human transform overnight into a large insect?) but it is nonetheless a harrowingly truthful story that advances existential dilemmas and makes a statement on human relationships, familial in particular. We say this is how it would feel like to be an outcast from one’s family. Or consider Hamsun’s Hunger in which a starving man puts his finger in his mouth and starts eating himself. In the ‘real’ world Kafka’s, Hamsun’s and Marquez’s characters cannot exist but the effect of their existence on us is as truthful and real as the dilemmas of any great realistic character ever created.

Marquez, like a god, has written the First Testament of Latin America, synthesising myth and magic to reveal the truth of the human condition, and called it One Hundred Years of Solitude.

(First published in Spanish 1967; in English 1970)

Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Why did nothing happen?
“How would I know?”
“You would know.”
“I would?”
“Yes.”
“How I would know?”
“Because you read it.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.“
“How do you know?”
“It is on your shelf.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means you have read it.”
“Oh I have.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Why did nothing happen?”
“Because they were waiting for Godot.”

Waiting and nothing – I could take these two words and use them in as many combinations as the rules of probability allow to create a ‘review’ that is as much meaningful as it would be meaningless. I could draw upon the elusive symbolism of the text in the manner of a perspicacious hermeneut whose convoluted exegesis would only serve to frustrate him even more. Or like a blurb-writer I could summarise the four-and-a-half characters, the austere landscape, the leafless tree, the role of the taut rope and jangling bucket, and the heap of nonsense, but what would that achieve?

Suffice it to say that the sheer speed of bare dialogue makes you want to slow down and look for something queer happening between the lines, but nothing happens. Yet something very important happens: everything happens. Aye. Beckett in his frugal minimalist brilliance has created in every reader’s mind a throbbing sense of meaningless wait. The act of wait which is an act of life, since every moment of human life is spent at the same time in a concurrent act of waiting – whether it is waiting in the womb of your mother for nine months or waiting for nine hours for your lover to turn up. Or just waiting at the bus stop for a vehicle that never arrives. You wait for things to happen; but nothing happens; yet life happens.

The best review I have read said, “This is a very interesting play.” Which is to say that the best review of Waiting for Godot is precisely the one that is not written down.

(First published 1953)

Thinner Than Skin – Uzma Aslam Khan

After the success of The Geometry of God and Trespassing, I expected Uzma Aslam Khan to build further on her reputation as one of the eminent novelists chronicling the lives of contemporary Pakistanis but this novel has come as a disappointment.

It started well enough, with two lead characters, Nadir and Farhana – the former a Pakistani in the United States struggling to build a life of promise in a country his parents had sent him to study; and the latter, a mix-raced Pakistani-German who wants to discover the Pakistani side of her identity by ‘returning’ to Pakistan which is now gripped in turmoil. Through their uneasy love we see the uneasy love Pakistanis carry for their homeland, which they have many reasons to despair for and leave behind. And the promise of the new lands of the West, which, despite it glitter and glory, cannot fully satisfy the needs of those who have shunned their homelands.

Parallel to it runs the story of Maryam and her family who are herders for generations. Through them the author has painted a grim picture of the situation the locals of the mountainous north of Pakistan have found themselves in. Hemmed in by all sides in a conflict that spills across borders – trouble in Xinjiang, violence in Central Asian states, perennial instability in Afghanistan, oppression in Kashmir – all this spills into the once peaceful mountainous regions of Pakistan where the state and its rebels fight out each other at the cost of the local people.

The fates of Nadir and Farhana get entwined with that of Maryam and her family when an accident happens during their visit of discovery to the Northern Areas. They are sucked into a conflict which is as much personal as it is public and political.

Our story stalls after the accident, the manner in which the author shows both parties dealing with the accident is…very lacking. There are lots of monologues the characters address to themselves, that do little but confuse the reader. If the author was attempting unreliable narration, it certainly didn’t work.

Maryam’s story and the characters that populate her world, in my view, do not talk and behave as northern mountain people do. An air mystery surrounds Maryam’s family which is not dealt with cleverly. She is also depicted as following some strange pagan cult, even though they are clearly shown to be Muslims, albeit holding on to some ancient mountain rituals for which they get plenty of scorn from Muslims who purport to follow a more ‘purist’ form of Islam. Bluntly put, the writing on Maryam’s family is not intelligent – it has little to hold your attention; it is more like a long and repetitive ramble.

The last part of the novel did not satisfy me. The thread of the plot is lost after the accident takes place. From that point on the story only drags and ends abruptly and nonsensically.

I vacillated between giving it two stars and three stars. If I had given it two stars, this would have been quite harsh of me; if I had awarded it three, this would have meant I liked it more than I had. So I settle for 50/50; I rate this novel as halfway between acceptance – a 2.5 stars out of 5.

(First published 2012)

Sula – Toni Morrison

“Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change.”

It is time for change; slowly, painfully, but inexorably the spirit of the age sheds old rags and dons a new garb. The mutes are beginning to discover a voice that had been trapped in their windpipes; eyes see things that they had hitherto only watched; and hearts ache with a new throb of hope mixed with fear of which no one can tell which is greater. From this sense of foreboding out comes Sula.

The excluded community confined up in the hills outside a small Ohio town is made, through centuries of social conditioning, to see themselves as different and separate from the white people. They know who they are and they also know they are not the same as the people who live in the town down the hills. They aredifferent, in every imaginable way. You could see that.

They are scandalised when Sula, one of their own, embarks on a path that’s opening up out there, a path of education and mobility, of employment and relocation, of mingling with the white folks as their human equal, if not racial, social or political equal. Gods be good, the black people are offered to live their lives like the white folks!

“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

When she returns home after a long absence Sula is transformed into an unintelligible mass of thoughts and actions her people find difficult to square: It’s like a white girl in black skin. Or so people think. Unpardonable. Outrageous. Her community is devastated; nothing is more sacrilegious than dressing like white people, speaking like them, behaving like them, being like them. And what’s more, Sula has taken a white man for a lover. Sula, we’re not the same. Ah, what an incredible fact of human psychology that even if you do not lose a sense of identity and self-respect, you eventually come to accept the role to which your oppressor designates you.

Sula becomes a pariah in her own community, uncomprehending and incomprehensible. The ominous signs that lend her a preternatural aura testify to something strange. People see those signs in retrospect, from her birth to childhood, from her growing up as a daughter of a woman abandoned by her husband, from the way she looked at them when she was a child, the way she walked and sat, ate and gestured. Sula, they reach on a terrifying conclusion, is not a young black girl but a phantom implanted from a world of shadows. She is almost a witch, and if she really is not, she ought to be one.

Sula’s character is a symbol (self-contradictory, torn, divided, compartmentalised, unmappable) of the conflict borne of the changing values that had held together isolated, nebulous, inward-looking black communities across the United States in the age of institutionalised racism. Values constructed so carefully over centuries when challenged elicit a response that’s always out of proportion. Sula is a couldn’t-care-less woman whose threatening individuality alienates her from her community. For this she is taken to task. Her own dealings with her family and the community bespeak a cruelty she’s picked up in the course of her contact with the outer world. She, a black woman, treats her own kith and kin with a shade of contempt with which they had always been treated by the White Others.

Her character elicits mixed reactions. Sometimes you want to blame her, sometimes blame her family, sometimes you want to blame the sudden rush of new ideas that has thrown the whole social equation out of balance.
Was it the new life among the white folks that turned her against herself? Or was it to do with her troubled early years, living as she did with her mother who had taken to selling sex as the most natural vocation a woman might take when her husband walked out on her, causing a rupture in relations with the community? Or did her people, unable to take her novelty, pushed her to the wall, turned her into an alien in her own skin?

What made Sula, Sula? This is a question you’ll be grappling with by the end of the novel.

“You have been gone too long, Sula.

Not too long, but maybe too far.”

(First published 1973)

I Take This Woman – Rajinder Singh Bedi

We are used to reading fictions from the Subcontinent (much of it below par) that seem perennially to swing between the two psycho-social poles of pre and post-marriage lives, with all its unsavoury offshoots – a long, never ending A Suitable Boy. The former is spent under controlling parents who consider it their inviolable right to make every important (and unimportant) decision of your life and the latter wasted under the burdens of connubial anti-bliss from whose poisonous claws the only safe escape is death, natural or brought forward (Throw in a love story to make all this palatable). Both lives are bound together by a shared thread of entrapment and women characters, naturally, lead those stories.

There is no gainsaying a mindset that views children as human properties whose relationship with their parents is given idealised treatment in filial caricatures reminiscent of master-disciple relationships of mystical tales: smiling, submissive, sacrificing, histrionic, conforming – ready to leap into the fire on a subtle hint of the nod. Maa, tu kahe to main jaan de doon.This is supposed to be out of love, respect and duty. And if there’s anyone who thinks marriage is not a fixed point of reference in a life-calender from which the BCs and ACs of one’s existential trajectory are measured, then one should pick up this novella and see for herself that a desi life can almost be reduced to a formula: birth, marriage, death. (Who knows, this in part may also account for the extremely fecund wombs of our women. My grandmother were 16 brother and sisters, none of them half)

One reason for the proliferation of these themes is the massive influence Progressive Writers’ Movement exercised on writers who led the Indian literary scene from 1930s onwards. They focused, inter alia, on social realities they believed were incompatible with the spirit of the time that valued social justice and battled gender inequality. Underprivileged people, especially women and poor, were made the subject of countless stories. So much was written with so much speed that women found themselves trapped between conflicting and competing ideas of male reformers about the role women should have in society. But on the bright side this literary exercise did much to raise popular consciousness. A debate was set going that couldn’t be stopped.

Rajinder Singh Bedi was an integral part of the new movement and a stalwart Urdu writer on social issues. He knew how to draw out emotions without dragging the protagonists through a sentimentalist swamp. Here in this novel he elicits sympathy through careful blending of tribal ethos with Rano’s simple desire for familial happiness that has fallen apart when her husband, Tiloka, is murdered. She is no angry intellect soliloquising endlessly in utter disbelief, an easy and once famous way to get a story out of a literary midget, but a sorrowful heart bracing the blows of widowhood with her strength of character; the unique situation she is faced with brings out most prominently the absurdity of her conundrum: in her best interests she is required to marry Mangal, her dead husband’s younger brother, who is many years her junior and whom she had raised like a son.
Rano’s complete silence adds to the sheer confusion of young Mangal whose simmering romance with a village girl he’s supposed to marry is common knowledge. Family elders ‘ask’ Mangal point blank to sacrifice his love to offer male protection to Rano who, of course, could not survive on her own as a widow with young children.

Whether or not they escape this trap is for the reader to find out, but it turns out that men, too, are victims of the same system that puts them above women.

(First published in Urdu 1967; translated by Khushwant Singh)

Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata

A metaphor of rotting and unappreciated beauty. Deep in the frozen reaches of the Snow Country a geisha waits out her days for a man who would give her the life of love and dignity that she believes she deserves.

Geishas in the Japanese society enjoyed similar social prestige as the Courtesans of the Indian Muslim culture. They were the connoisseurs of culture and art; they exerted political influence through their patrons; they decided the fates of people who desired their services; they made and broke marriages – they were a soft power centre in the Japanese society.

But in the backwater of the Snow Country only a perception of this power remains. The Geishas there live under crushing poverty and hopeless surrender, maintaining a façade of self-importance but in reality are no more than prostitutes offering affordable services to travelling men.

This novel is a heartfelt depiction of that culture, told through the story of a Snow Country Geisha, Komako, who meets a rich idler from Tokyo, Shimamura, who comes to the town to enjoy the hot springs it’s famous for. Shimamura knows immediately when he sees Komako that she is unlike other Geishas of the town. They develop a relationship but it never goes anywhere. The rich city idler is as though unable to reciprocate the love of Komako who, despite something special in her, is only a hot spring Geisha in his eyes. He tries to involve himself emotionally but can’t stop himself from looking down upon her.

The novel reads like a dream with disjointed and abruptly changing scenes fusing into one another. The writer’s stylistic method is to juxtapose two opposing and contrasting characteristics as in old Haiku: light against dark, sound against silence, being a sex selling Geisha who has a clean and fresh countenance, the whistle of the teapot against the continuous sound of the silence…. and there are beautiful evocations of the stark nature of the Snow Country and the frugality of its people, their lifestyle, travails and their aspirations.

I liked the way the story builds up into a high emotion in so imperceptible a way, without any loud noise-making plot twists. I enjoyed the novel a lot.

(Written during 1935-37; translated from the Japanese by Edward Seidensticker)

The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri

Book subtitle: I will write down everything I know about a certain family of Bengali immigrants in the United States by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Immigrant anguish – the toll it takes in settling in an alien country after having bidden adieu to one’s home, family, and culture is what this prize-winning novel is supposed to explore, but it’s no more than a superficial complaint about a few signature – and done to death – South Asian issues relating to marriage and paternal expectations: a clichéd immigrant story, I’m afraid to say.

Gogol’s life, and that of every person related to him in any way, from the day of his birth to his divorce at 30, is documented in a long monotone, like a camera trained on a still scene, without zooming in and out, recording every movement the lens catches, accidentally. A final picture emerges in which nothing in particular stands out; and twists that could have been explored more deeply, on a philosophical and humanistic level, such as Gogol’s disillusionment with his dual identity or the aftermath of (Gogol’s father) Ashoke’s death are touched upon perfunctorily or rushed through.

Some cultural comparisons are made as though to validate the enlightened United States at the cost of backward India. This is a familiar line in immigrant success stories: to justify their decision to migrate to the West by heaping scorn on the country or culture of their origin.

But even that’s not done intelligently. E.g; Maxine’s mother wears swimsuit on the lakeside; Gogol thinks his mother would never do that. Maxine’s parents don’t bother when Gogol moves into their house and have sex with Maxine; Gogol’s parents would have been horrified! It is almost in these words the comparisons are made. Well, of course. We get it.

However, on the bright side, I liked the trope of public vs private names – Nikhil aka Gogol – and how Lahiri relates this private, accidental double-naming to the protagonist’s larger identity crisis as an American and Indian immigrant. But, again, it’s also wasted; it doesn’t stand out; nothing catches your fancy; nothing piques your interest; and you sit with a little impatience welling up inside you.

You just sit there, squinting your eyes, making faces at the text, wondering…Pulitzer? Are you kidding me?

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

Told almost entirely in dialogue-driven vernacular, it is a haunting depiction of the labouring class of Salinas Valley (California). Through the story of two friends who travel to another town to find petty work, Steinbeck has so imperceptibly painted a grim picture of their travails, hardships and dreams. They are hardworking but wasteful but have aspirations for their future. When one of them, due to his mental weakness, does something terrible at the new workplace, their plans to save up and have a patch of land of their own fall into jeopardy.

The novella could really have been a novel. I’d have liked it to explore the previous lives of the lead characters a tad more to put their current lives in perspective. I was apprehensive, in the beginning, for the good deal of dialogue written in slang or vernacular. But it turned out really well. Come to think of it, it is the dialogue in real life tilt which brings out in full force the essence of the labour class characters. All in all a good, enjoyable read, if not for its literary writing than for its simulated slang.

First published 1937

The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

For those scared of the size of Tolstoy’s stellar works like ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina’, this novella may be a good starting point as an introduction to the art of Tolstoy. Set in imperial Russia at a time when every aspiring person seemed to measure their success through their rank or office in the Russian civil service, it is an excellent critique of the elite’s aspirations, the suffocating formality of their lifestyles, of their being beholden to positions and job titles.

At the same time it’s a meditation on the fickleness of life people spend too much time decorating, and making big of one’s achievements. Only just when the middle-aged Ivan Ilyich feels he has made it in life and now can relax away his years in service at a higher position, he is visited by an illness that kills him in pain and misery. His unsuccessful fight against the illness forms most of the narrative of the novella, with frequent retrospectie meditations on his identity, his position, his achievements, and how he ought to be happy at where he has reached in life, but is he happy?

His colleagues receive the news of his death perfunctorily, feeling sorry for the poor devil, and immediately launch upon a discussion as to how Ivan Ilyich’s death might have affected the chain of promotions in the hierarchy of the civil service.

How once Ivan Ilyich seemed indispensable to everything – his work, family, friends – but was easily castaway from memory of things soon after his death. This story has a moralistic side to it too, as a critique of the love for the mundane, since it was written after Tolstoy’s famous reversion to Christianity.

First published in Russian 1886