Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

could never accept that he regarded the upper level of the working intelligentsia as better informed than he.
     
    “ Invention in literature is sometimes superior to truth. Literary characters may say things they would never have said in real life, and this can be a greater revelation than the naked truth. It can be a regular festival for art. When I write, I can comprehend my reader through my imagination, and I can see exactly what he needs. ”
     
    He warmed to his topic and said as if addressing only Vasily Kiprianovich, and with fondness: “ The language of a work of art is simply everything ! Had Leo Tolstoy been able to think as clearly as Comrade Stalin he would not have tangled himself in long sentences. How can one approach the language of the common people? Even Turgenev, that Frenchman in Russian garb, and the Symbolists are simply seduced by the French syntax. I have to admit that in 1917, when I was still living the bohemian life, with an outrageous haircut though terribly shy, I had a literary crisis. I realized that, in fact, I didn ’ t really know Russian. I didn ’ t have a feeling for what mode of expression to use in a sentence. And do you know what set me on the right path? Studying legal documents from the seventeenth century and earlier. When an accused was being questioned and tortured, the scribes would record precisely and concisely what he said. While someone was being flogged, stretched on the rack, or burned with a hot iron, the most unadorned speech, coming from his very bowels, would burst forth from him. And this is something absolutely new! It ’ s the language Russians have been speaking for a thousand years, but none of our writers have used it. Now this, ” he said, dripping some of the thick apricot jam from a teaspoon onto a small glass dish, “ this very amber transparency, this surprising color and light should be present in the literary language as well. ”
     
    And, indeed, every single apricot lay like a condensed fragment of sunlight in the crystal bowl. The cherry jam also had its own mysterious color, imperceptibly different from a dark claret, yet it was not the right color and could not be compared with the apricot.
     
    “ Now and again these days a letter surfaces from some reader who writes in the primordial language. I had one not long ago from a workman building a factory in Kharkov. His language doesn ’ t follow today ’ s rules, yet it had such compelling combinations and use of grammatical cases! I envy the writer! ‘ I didn ’ t bewray my design, ’ ‘ There was no cause for evadement , ’ or, ‘ There ’ s queer small substance to this heroism. ’ What do you think? Only an ear that hasn ’ t been intimidated by book learning can come up with something like that. And his vocabulary! It makes your mouth water. ‘ I found myself a sojourning, ’ ‘ We sweated and strained and learned to live with it, ’ ‘ forenenst the prison, ’ ‘ I became entirely bereft of feelings. ’ Things like that you can ’ t invent, even if you swallow your pen, as Nekrasov said. And if someone offers you such turns of phrase, you absolutely have to pick them up . . . ”
     
    “ Are you planning to reply in the same fashion? ” asked Vasily Kiprianovich.
     
    “ What can I say to him? The point isn ’ t in the answer. The point is in discovering a language. ”
    1994
     
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    EGO
     
     
     
     
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    Even before he reached his thirties, even before the German War, Pavel Vasilyevich Ektov realized that he was a confirmed and perhaps even a natural-born activist in the rural cooperative movement, and so he never took up any of the grandiose, earth-shaking causes of the time. In order to keep true to his beliefs, he had to engage in some bitter debates on how best to remake the life around him and to resist the temptations and withstand the rebukes of the revolutionary democrats: devoting himself to social change by promoting