In his new book of essays, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders writes that fiction, far from being simply “a hobby, pastime or indulgence,” reminds us that “everything remains to be seen. It is a sacrament devoted to this end.”
Yet he's wary of treating stories “as a kind of salvation,” as if the world could be put right if only more folks would read the right literature. The seven short stories he discusses in this book—stories penned by Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy—were written during a Russian literary renaissance that lasted seventy years but was “followed by one of the bloodiest, most irrational periods in human history.” The beauty of that “artistic bounty” wasn’t enough to save the world.
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