Mavis Gallant is sitting “in her apartment on Rue Jean Ferrandi” when, in a “voice gentle yet commanding”, she says “There are two kinds of writers to me, the Tolstoy and the Dostoevsky.”

With this Russian project underway, I sat up a little straighter. “And they’re both extraordinary,” she allows, “but it’s a completely different school. ” It’s “like a game, you can put every writer into the Tolstoy or the Dostoevsky side. . . think of names and they go instantly Tolstoy /Dostoevsky. Tolstoy’s my side.”

(This is quoted in J.R. Patterson’s “Different Strokes: Selections from Mavis Gallant and Carol Shields”, in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of Literary Review of Canada. That “Telescope” episode I’ve seen three times, but his quotes feel fresh.)

My Gallant stories are in a squat, narrow maple bookcase with room for only Shields, Pym, Munro, Sarton, Trevor, and Betty Smith. They are all smaller books that fit perfectly on old-fashioned shelves, next to an oversized Ikea fold-out, and a wall lamp that is killer-bright when you walk into the room but behind one shoulder it’s perfect for reading.

That’s where I have been reading Welsh writer Dorothy Edwards’ story collection Rhapsody. (I’d chosen it for #Dewithon, which Paula hosted for several years, not realising that Bookertalk now carries that baton.)

Reading “The Conquered”, where young Frederick is in his aunt’s dining-room “reading Tourguéniev with a dictionary and about three grammars”. Where his young cousins Jessica and Ruthie come bustling into the room to visit with their friend Gwyneth, who has just arrived with all her charms.

Where an unassuming visit to the country is transformed by talk of Schumann and Chopin, Keats and Schubert, and the nightingale’s song. Frederick has never heard the nightingale sing, but he muses on sadness in art: how Nietzsche, for instance, differentiated between the melancholy of omnipotence and the melancholy of power.

Frederick tells his cousins and Gwyneth about an evening shared with friends when a woman sang the “Polens Grabgesang”. “I do not think I have ever heard in my life anything so terribly moving as the part, ‘O Polen, mein Polen,’ which is repeated several times,” he says. “Everyone in the room was stirred, and, after she had sung it, we talked about nothing but politics and the Revolution for the whole of the evening.”

That’s not what happens in Turgenev’s “The Singers”, which we read and discussed last month. Instead, everyone was stirred into an evening of drinking. So perhaps it’s fitting that Frederick observes that the world is divided into sad people and gay people. Perhaps Gwyneth’s charm is rooted in her disorienting and persistent gaiety, in contrast to Frederick’s (and cousins’) melancholy.

I couldn’t help but think of Turgenev’s chasm—although the only Tourguéniev work Gwyneth has read is Fumée, so their conversation is cut short. His writing is referenced more times in the story than is fitting, given that only Frederick is engaged with it, and there is much talk of singing, of singers, and Dorothy Edwards is preoccupied by music (her second and final book is Winter Sonata) so it’s easy to imagine that she had “The Singers” in mind.

But all of this is to say that, even though I have not felt very confident about my reading of George Saunders’ exploration of these seven nineteenth-century stories, I am beginning to feel encouraged from the most unexpected places—the recesses of my 2025 stacks.

Inspired by a quote in The Writer’s Library, I recently reread Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? and Still No Word for You. Only to find that he rereads “The Schoolmistress” at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Grantham, NH on May 22, 2021 and dedicates Chapter 73 to it. “There may be a pandemic,” he says: “But there are free samples [of the new breakfast sandwich] and there is Chekhov.”

He summarises the story in about three pages, and it’s fun to compare his by-the-by comments with some of Saunders’. “As they continue on, Marya and Old Semyon don’t make any remarks,” Orner observes. “They don’t, for instance, say, Khanov is going to see Bakvist when he knows he’s not home? That’s strange!” He talks about the mud and the murder and, at one point, declares that not much happens.

He ends with the same segment that Bill and Bron and I found so striking, when we read the story in February: “No one loved her, and her life was passing by miserably, without affection, without the sympathy of friends, and without any interesting acquaintances. What a terrible thing it would be if she fell in love in her position!”

Orner writes:

“Remarkable the distance, the abyss, between these two sentences. It’s also too funny to even laugh at. Because he knew. Most of us are miserable village schoolteachers. Given the choice to escape, we’ll remain. Imagine the calamities if our stray daydreams came true.”

All this has reminded me of the acronym that Saunders introduces when he writes about the Turgenev story: Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing (TICHN). And about how personal our reading experiences are in the end.

How we notice different things. Different things from other people’s reading. Different things from our own readings, when we return to reread. I haven’t been rereading these stories that Saunders has selected, but I know Bron has, and I think Bill has: it feels as though I am finding new things to notice all the time, so perhaps I will reread too.

Here’s our schedule. Free free to join us, for the remainder or for a single story. Later this month, I’ll create a project page linking to each participant’s posts. And mid-month we’ll chat about “The Darling”.

Anton Chekhov “In the Cart” 1897 (February) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Ivan Turgenev “The Singers” 1852 (March) Trans. David Magarshack
Anton Chekhov “The Darling” 1899 (April) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Master and Man” 1895 (May) Trans. Louise Mude and Aylmer Maude
Nikolai Gogol “The Nose” 1836 (June) Trans. Mary Struve
Anton Chekhov “Gooseberries” 1898 (July) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Alyosha the Pot” 1905 (August) Trans. Clarence Brown