Song of the Prairie

On seeing a puppet show - probably Punch & Judy - Oscar Wilde said, "What an economy of means! And an economy of ends!" I'm certain that the puppet films of Jiří Trnka would change his mind. A painter, sculptor, and illustrator, Trnka (1912-1969), turned to making "puppet films" at the age of 33, and over a career spanning just 18 years he made a handful of delightful films. Given the amount of time it takes to shoot just a few minutes of stop-motion animation, most of his films he made were shorts, but he also managed to make several feature-length films, including The Czech Year (1947), The Emperor's Nightingale (1949, released in the U.S. in 1951 with a narration spoken by Boris Karloff), an animated version of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk (1955) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959). Trnka was directly involved in the creation of his "puppets," but he also designed the settings and backgrounds of his films. The figures themselves don't speak (though they sometimes sing), and their facial expressions rarely change, which simplifies the animation process. Trnka's films attracted attention for their unique artistry, but also because they were different from Disney's animation in their use of human figures.

Just after making The Bass Cello in 1949, an adaptation of a Chekhov story, Trnka made Song of the Prairie, a 21-minute tribute to American Westerns, and a sweet upstaging of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). One of the things Sergio Leone taught us is how easily the Western film could be boiled down to its essential elements. How a certain landscape (desert, a single building or cluster of buildings on the edge of the wilderness), a railroad track and a train (even if the train whistle was all wrong), cowboy regalia (the hat, the boots, the gun belt, perhaps the chaps), and, perhaps the most important element, the silence, could be used as signals, indicators, around which nothing much needs to happen, can add up to an entire film. An evocation of a genre, without the slightest authenticity. Figures from fantasy. What we also learned from Leone was that Hollywood, where the genre had originated, had been doing the same thing for decades - relying on stock figures, props, costumes, and stories that dealt out morality in either primary colors or black and white.

80 years later, the figures that appear in Stagecoach, Ford's first great Western of the sound era, have become archetypes: the Andy Devine coachman, the Thomas Mitchell alcoholic, the John Carradine card-sharp, the John Wayne hero. They all appear in Song of the Prairie. A stagecoach is pulled along by a team of four horses, two men sitting atop, a pipe-smoking driver and another man riding shotgun, who never stops drinking from bottles of whisky under his seat, tossing empty bottles along the route, with a conspicuous black case conspicuously marked with the word GOLD, and two passengers inside, a large bewhiskered man who remains asleep throughout, and a lone woman, who knits a large sock and who stabilizes the tottering sleeper now and then. A bird flies alongside, chirping, and the woman sings with it. The men atop, and even the horses, turn to watch, enchanted by her song. They are soon joined by a lone rider, who sings, ducking as empty whisky bottles fly past (John Wayne's Ringo Kid doesn't sing, but Gene Autry and Roy Rogers did). The woman hands a red book to the rider, riding alongside the stagecoach. He throws it in the air and shoots his pistol at it, the coachman catches it when it falls and passes it back to the woman inside. Still singing, she holds out the woolen sock she's been knitting and he takes it. Holding it aloft, the rider waves goodbye to her with his hat, his clever horse spinning triumphantly. On the pages inside the book are bullet holes in the shape of a heart.

The stagecoach arrives in a darkened canyon. The stagecoach stops when a man appears on the trail. He climbs aboard and charms the woman with a card trick. Night falls. The crew and passengers adjourn at a farm house. A coyote sings plaintively in the distance (an English horn). Trnka turns the card sharp into the villain, and the attackers of the stagecoach into Mexicans, and they are after the gold. It is guarded by the heavy-drinking coachman, who is sleeping it off atop the stagecoach. He has run out of whisky, so the bandit poisons one bottle and offers it to the guard. He drinks it down, and the only ill effect the poison has on him is that when he spits whatever his spittle hits is vaporized.

The next morning, the stagecoach continues on its journey. The bandits attack on horseback and the woman cries for help. The singing cowboy hears her and gallops to the rescue, tracking the stagecoach by the many empty whisky bottles along the trail. He arrives on the scene in time to see the villain riding away with the woman across his saddle. The hero shoots all the bandits and chases the card-sharp into the canyon. Trnka creates enough surprises to make the hero's triumph both exciting and funny.

Having seen the end-credits of Coraline (2009), I knew how many people (more than 500) were involved in its making, but, being old-fashioned I suppose, I sought out one person, or perhaps two, in the credits to whom I could assign ultimate credit for the film, if only in my own head. I am not an auteurist, but I've grown comfortable with the idea that, generally, every film can be attributed to a single guiding intelligence, whether it's a director or a writer or a producer. I may be completely spoiled, but my ideal in the case of stop-motion animators is Jiří Trnka.

Tango del Violador

Out of respect for languages I never learned, or didn't learn thoroughly enough, I usually avoid reading poetry in translation. Of course, I've read the classics in translation, and some of my favorite authors, like Chekhov, Camus, and Kawabata, I know only from translations. But it's prose. As Virginia Woolf explained, "to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one's own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces."

Despite my ignorance of Spanish, however, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is one of my heroes. But you, dear reader, must know this if you've looked up this blog on a web search. "Widower's Tango" (Tango del Viudo) is the title of a Neruda poem that he included in his collection, Residence on Earth. I chose to name my blog after the poem for reasons that I described in a post on February 1, 2011. In 2001, I copied a page from the life of Neruda when I waited until my wife left our apartment at around 11 AM and watched her drive out of sight. Then I moved a van I had rented the day before to the bottom of the stairs, filled several empty boxes with all of my clothes, books, videos, cds - everything that I still considered to be mine - and carried them down to the van. When I was done, I taped a note to the screen of our big screen TV (far too heavy to carry down three flights of stairs), locked the front door, slid the key under it, and drove from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa without stopping. I hadn't told her I was leaving. The note said I had gone to San Diego. I left her in such a manner because I couldn't think of any other way to get away clean. 

Neruda found himself in a similarly impossible predicament with a Burmese woman he called Josie Bliss. I won't recount the whole story. It can be found in his Memoirs, first published (in Spanish) in 1974, and in English translation (by Hardie St. Martin) in 1977. Neruda was involved in the editing of the book when he died of cancer in 1972. The editing was completed and the book was published with the revelatory title, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias - "I confess that I lived".

And then everything I knew - or thought I knew - about Neruda was called into question when, the day after Thanksgiving, I read this headline from The Guardian: "Poet, hero, rapist – outrage over Chilean plan to rename airport after Neruda". It was the first time I'd heard anything about Neruda being a rapist. Doing a little digging, I learned that the accusation has been a hot potato since 2010, when Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian socialist provocateur, quoted a passage from Neruda's Memoirs as an example of liberal hypocrisy. In the book, the particular passage quoted by Žižek comes right after Neruda had been revisited by Josie Bliss in Ceylon and he had to pack her off back to Burma to keep her from being arrested and forcibly deported. Here is the entire passage that has caused all the latest controversy:

My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn't see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.

The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.

Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.

She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.

She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn't get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. That ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.


For me, the strangest thing about this story, which took place in 1929, is not Neruda's forthright confession of what he had done to the Tamil woman, or his evident contrition, but how it could've been in print for 36 years, in its original Spanish and in translations into several other languages, read by thousands of people, including critics and biographers, before anyone had a problem with it.

In my online search for articles using the keywords "Pablo Neruda rapist", I found one (one was enough) written by a journalist (1) who clearly made up a story about how she had just bought a bagful of Neruda books, along with the new biography of Neruda by Mark Eisner, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling, had read the incriminating passage from Neruda's Memoirs while riding the subway, and, after interviewing Eisner, who was fair enough to tell her "he was incredibly influential as a human being, and played such a historic role that included so many political events, and he’s so important for understanding social and artistic movements”, took all of her Neruda books off her shelf and threw them into a recycle bin.

But there is a passage in Neruda's Memoirs that comes just before the rape that provides some welcome context for his mistreatment of the Tamil woman:

Solitude in Colombo was not only dull but indolent. I had a few friends on the street where I lived. Girls of various colorings visited my campaign cot, leaving no record but the lightning spasm of the flesh. My body was a lonely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. One friend, Patsy, showed up frequently with some of her friends, dusky and golden, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood. They went to bed with me sportingly, asking for nothing in return.

One of them told me all about her visits to the "chummeries." That's what they called the bungalows where young Englishmen, clerks in shops or firms, lived together in groups to save on money and food. Without a trace of cynicism in her voice, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the girl told me that she had once had sex with fourteen of them.

"And why did you do it?" I asked her.

"They were having a party one night and I was alone with them. They turned on a gramophone, I danced a few steps with each of them, and as we danced, we'd lose our way into one bedroom or another. That way, everyone was happy."

She was not a prostitute. No, she was just another product of colonialism, a candid and generous fruit off its tree. Her story impressed me, and from then on, I had a soft spot for her in my heart.

Neruda was a lifelong communist, but his observations in Burma and Ceylon, both British colonies, were somewhat disingenuous, and his intimacy with the "downtrodden" native people was more than a little patronizing, especially from a young man in a position of authority. To Neruda, and to the reader decades later, it was a different world in a different time. In Burma, Neruda had a native lover. His relations with her were initially purely physical. But the woman's possessiveness and jealousy soon became intolerable. He was trapped with her until he received orders that he was transferred to Ceylon. He saw his opportunity to leave the woman, abandoning almost everything to keep her from suspecting, and went off to board the ship just like he was going to work. Were there sexual and racial aspects to his relations with the women he encountered in the East? Of course there were - since he was from the other side of the world and didn't speak their languages. Yes, it is significant that the beautiful Tamil woman was a pariah caste and that she was already familiar with Neruda's shit. She may have been "untouchable" but she was still eminently desirable. It was perhaps her very low social status that made her even more fascinating to Neruda. If she had somehow testified her own case to us, if we had known anything more of her than Neruda gave us in his confieso, perhaps it would be different. But Mark Eisner suggests that even Josie Bliss may have been a fictitious person. As far as we can tell, was there ever a beautuful Tamil woman whom Neruda ravaged?

I am tentatively (perhaps selectively) in favor of the #MeToo movement, giving credence to voices that were formerly and historically silenced. I hoped that enough people would take it seriously to block the recent Supreme Court justice nomination. But we aren't there yet. If any formerly avid reader of Neruda can use the sketchy anecdote from his youth as enough of a reason to reject his life's work, they probably weren't serious about him in the first place. I think there is a dividing line between a person's life and their work. I won't excuse or forgive what Neruda did - and confessed to having done. I don't consider it my place to do either. Does it change the way I think of Neruda, or lessen my consideration of his work? As I said before, I don't - can't - properly judge the quality of his poetry. But the chilling first words of "Tango del viudo" still thrill through me --

Ah maligna ...

And, for the record, I won't be changing the name of this blog any time soon, and they probably won't be changing the name of Santiago's airport.  


(1) Joshunda Sanders.

In Exile

"Ha, banishment! be merciful, say 'death;'
For exile hath more terror in his look,
Much more than death: do not say 'banishment.'

-Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 scene III

Banishment must be one of the oldest forms of penal servitude. Being deprived of all the comforts of civilization, particularly those of one's homeland, has often been considered to be worse than death. As late as the 19th century, people convicted of some of the worst crimes in England were sometimes offered a choice between hanging and transportation to the antipodes.

Countries with distant frontiers, like Russia, have long traditions of sending undesirables to the edge of nowhere. Dostoevsky was sent to one such nowhere by Czar Nicholas I, inspiring him to write one of his most moving novels, From The House of the Dead.(1)

Under Communism, the Gulags (2) continued to flourish and were further immortalized in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Soviets were also modern practitioners of :internal exile", opting to move some of their more celebratred dissidents, like Andrei Sakharov, to cities that were hard to get to and, of course, even harder to get out of. These "refuseniks", as they came to be known, were quite vocal in their desire to leave the communist state, causing severe embarrassment to its customarily pitiless rulers. For what is there to say in favor of a country from which banishment is a boon?

Chekhov visited Siberia in 1890, and saw firsthand what life was like for prisoners who'd been sent there. The experience inspired one of his most indelible - and stirringly political - stories, called simply "In Exile" (1892).


OLD SEMYON, nicknamed Canny, and a young Tatar, whom no one knew by name, were sitting on the river-bank by the camp-fire; the other three ferrymen were in the hut. Semyon, an old man of sixty, lean and toothless, but broad shouldered and still healthy-looking, was drunk; he would have gone in to sleep long before, but he had a bottle in his pocket and he was afraid that the fellows in the hut would ask him for vodka. The Tatar was ill and weary, and wrapping himself up in his rags was describing how nice it was in the Simbirsk province, and what a beautiful and clever wife he had left behind at home. He was not more than twenty five, and now by the light of the camp-fire, with his pale and sick, mournful face, he looked like a boy.

"To be sure, it is not paradise here," said Canny. "You can see for yourself, the water, the bare banks, clay, and nothing else....Easter has long passed and yet there is ice on the river, and this morning there was snow..."

"It's bad! it's bad!" said the Tatar, and looked round him in terror.

The dark, cold river was flowing ten paces away; it grumbled, lapped against the hollow clay banks and raced on swiftly towards the far-away sea. Close to the bank there was the dark blur of a big barge, which the ferrymen called a "karbos." Far away on the further bank, lights, dying down and flickering up again, zigzagged like little snakes; they were burning last year's grass. And beyond the little snakes there was darkness again. There little icicles could be heard knocking against the barge It was damp and cold.

The Tatar glanced at the sky. There were as many stars as at home, and the same blackness all round, but something was lacking. At home in the Simbirsk province the stars were quite different, and so was the sky.

"It's bad! it's bad!" he repeated.

"You will get used to it," said Semyon, and he laughed. "Now you are young and foolish, the milk is hardly dry on your lips, and it seems to you in your foolishness that you are more wretched than anyone; but the time will come when you will say to yourself: 'I wish no one a better life than mine.' You look at me. Within a week the floods will be over and we shall set up the ferry; you will all go wandering off about Siberia while I shall stay and shall begin going from bank to bank. I've been going like that for twenty-two years, day and night. The pike and the salmon are under the water while I am on the water. And thank God for it, I want nothing; God give everyone such a life."

The Tatar threw some dry twigs on the camp-fire, lay down closer to the blaze, and said:

"My father is a sick man. When he dies my mother and wife will come here. They have promised."

"And what do you want your wife and mother for?" asked Canny. "That's mere foolishness, my lad. It's the devil confounding you, damn his soul! Don't you listen to him, the cursed one. Don't let him have his way. He is at you about the women, but you spite him; say, 'I don't want them!' He is on at you about freedom, but you stand up to him and say: 'I don't want it!' I want nothing, neither father nor mother, nor wife, nor freedom, nor post, nor paddock; I want nothing, damn their souls!"

Semyon took a pull at the bottle and went on:

"I am not a simple peasant, not of the working class, but the son of a deacon, and when I was free I lived at Kursk; I used to wear a frockcoat, and now I have brought myself to such a pass that I can sleep naked on the ground and eat grass. And I wish no one a better life. I want nothing and I am afraid of nobody, and the way I look at it is that there is nobody richer and freer than I am. When they sent me here from Russia from the first day I stuck it out; I want nothing! The devil was at me about my wife and about my home and about freedom, but I told him: 'I want nothing.' I stuck to it, and here you see I live well, and I don't complain, and if anyone gives way to the devil and listens to him, if but once, he is lost, there is no salvation for him: he is sunk in the bog to the crown of his head and will never get out.

"It is not only a foolish peasant like you, but even gentlemen, well-educated people, are lost. Fifteen years ago they sent a gentleman here from Russia. He hadn't shared something with his brothers and had forged something in a will. They did say he was a prince or a baron, but maybe he was simply an official -- who knows? Well, the gentleman arrived here, and first thing he bought himself a house and land in Muhortinskoe. 'I want to live by my own work,' says he, 'in the sweat of my brow, for I am not a gentleman now,' says he, 'but a settler.' 'Well,' says I, 'God help you, that's the right thing.' He was a young man then, busy and careful; he used to mow himself and catch fish and ride sixty miles on horseback. Only this is what happened: from the very first year he took to riding to Gyrino for the post; he used to stand on my ferry and sigh: 'Ech, Semyon, how long it is since they sent me any money from home!' 'You don't want money, Vassily Sergeyitch,' says I. 'What use is it to you? You cast away the past, and forget it as though it had never been at all, as though it had been a dream, and begin to live anew. Don't listen to the devil,' says I; 'he will bring you to no good, he'll draw you into a snare. Now you want money,' says I, ' but in a very little while you'll be wanting something else, and then more and more. If you want to be happy,' says I, the chief thing is not to want anything. Yes....If,' says I, 'if Fate has wronged you and me cruelly it's no good asking for her favor and bowing down to her, but you despise her and laugh at her, or else she will laugh at you.' That's what I said to him....

"Two years later I ferried him across to this side, and he was rubbing his hands and laughing. 'I am going to Gyrino to meet my wife,' says he. 'She was sorry for me,' says he; 'she has come. She is good and kind.' And he was breathless with joy. So a day later he came with his wife. A beautiful young lady in a hat; in her arms was a baby girl. And lots of luggage of all sorts. And my Vassily Sergeyitch was fussing round her; he couldn't take his eyes off her and couldn't say enough in praise of her. 'Yes, brother Semyon, even in Siberia people can live!' 'Oh, all right,' thinks I, 'it will be a different tale presently.' And from that time forward he went almost every week to inquire whether money had not come from Russia. He wanted a lot of money. 'She is losing her youth and beauty here in Siberia for my sake,' says he, 'and sharing my bitter lot with me, and so I ought,' says he, 'to provide her with every comfort....'

"To make it livelier for the lady he made acquaintance with the officials and all sorts of riff-raff. And of course he had to give food and drink to all that crew, and there had to be a piano and a shaggy lapdog on the sofa -- plague take it! ... Luxury, in fact, self-indulgence. The lady did not stay with him long. How could she? The clay, the water, the cold, no vegetables for you, no fruit. All around you ignorant and drunken people and no sort of manners, and she was a spoilt lady from Petersburg or Moscow....To be sure she moped. Besides, her husband, say what you like, was not a gentleman now, but a settler -- not the same rank.

"Three years later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, there was shouting from the further bank. I went over with the ferry, and what do I see but the lady, all wrapped up, and with her a young gentleman, an official. A sledge with three horses....I ferried them across here, they got in and away like the wind. They were soon lost to sight. And towards morning Vassily Sergeyitch galloped down to the ferry. 'Didn't my wife come this way with a gentleman in spectacles, Semyon?' 'She did,' said I; 'you may look for the wind in the fields!' He galloped in pursuit of them. For five days and nights he was riding after them. When I ferried him over to the other side afterwards, he flung himself on the ferry and beat his head on the boards of the ferry and howled. 'So that's how it is,' says I. I laughed, and reminded him 'people can live even in Siberia!' And he beat his head harder than ever....

"Then he began longing for freedom. His wife had slipped off to Russia, and of course he was drawn there to see her and to get her away from her lover. And he took, my lad, to galloping almost every day, either to the post or the town to see the commanding officer; he kept sending in petitions for them to have mercy on him and let him go back home; and he used to say that he had spent some two hundred roubles on telegrams alone. He sold his land and mortgaged his house to the Jews. He grew gray and bent, and yellow in the face, as though he was in consumption. If he talked to you he would go, khee -- khee -- khee, ... and there were tears in his eyes. He kept rushing about like this with petitions for eight years, but now he has grown brighter and more cheerful again: he has found another whim to give way to. You see, his daughter has grown up. He looks at her, and she is the apple of his eye. And to tell the truth she is all right, good-looking, with black eyebrows and a lively disposition. Every Sunday he used to ride with her to church in Gyrino. They used to stand on the ferry, side by side, she would laugh and he could not take his eyes off her. 'Yes, Semyon,' says he, 'people can live even in Siberia. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Look,' says he, 'what a daughter I have got! I warrant you wouldn't find another like her for a thousand versts round.' 'Your daughter is all right,' says I, 'that's true, certainly.' But to myself I thought: 'Wait a bit, the wench is young, her blood is dancing, she wants to live, and there is no life here.' And she did begin to pine, my lad....She faded and faded, and now she can hardly crawl about. Consumption.

"So you see what Siberian happiness is, damn its soul! You see how people can live in Siberia....He has taken to going from one doctor to another and taking them home with him. As soon as he hears that two or three hundred miles away there is a doctor or a sorcerer, he will drive to fetch him. A terrible lot of money he spent on doctors, and to my thinking he had better have spent the money on drink....She'll die just the same. She is certain to die, and then it will be all over with him. He'll hang himself from grief or run away to Russia -- that's a sure thing. He'll run away and they'll catch him, then he will be tried, sent to prison, he will have a taste of the lash...."

"Good! good!" said the Tatar, shivering with cold.

"What is good?" asked Canny.

"His wife, his daughter....What of prison and what of sorrow! -- anyway, he did see his wife and his daughter....You say, want nothing. But 'nothing' is bad! His wife lived with him three years -- that was a gift from God. 'Nothing' is bad, but three years is good. How not understand?"

Shivering and hesitating, with effort picking out the Russian words of which he knew but few, the Tatar said that God forbid one should fall sick and die in a strange land, and be buried in the cold and dark earth; that if his wife came to him for one day, even for one hour, that for such happiness he would be ready to bear any suffering and to thank God. Better one day of happiness than nothing.

Then he described again what a beautiful and clever wife he had left at home. Then, clutching his head in both hands, he began crying and assuring Semyon that he was not guilty, and was suffering for nothing. His two brothers and an uncle had carried off a peasant's horses, and had beaten the old man till he was half dead, and the commune had not judged fairly, but had contrived a sentence by which all the three brothers were sent to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, was left at home.

"You will get used to it!" said Semyon.

The Tatar was silent, and stared with tear-stained eyes at the fire; his face expressed bewilderment and fear, as though he still did not understand why he was here in the darkness and the wet, beside strangers, and not in the Simbirsk province.

Canny lay near the fire, chuckled at something, and began humming a song in an undertone.

"What joy has she with her father?" he said a little later. "He loves her and he rejoices in her, that's true; but, mate, you must mind your Ps and Qs with him, he is a strict old man, a harsh old man. And young wenches don't want strictness. They want petting and ha-ha-ha! and ho-ho-ho! and scent and pomade. Yes....Ech! life, life," sighed Semyon, and he got up heavily. "The vodka is all gone, so it is time to sleep. Eh? I am going, my lad...."

Left alone, the Tatar put on more twigs, lay down and stared at the fire; he began thinking of his own village and of his wife. If his wife could only come for a month, for a day; and then if she liked she might go back again. Better a month or even a day than nothing. But if his wife kept her promise and came, what would he have to feed her on? Where could she live here?

"If there were not something to eat, how could she live?" the Tatar asked aloud.

He was paid only ten kopecks for working all day and all night at the oar; it is true that travelers gave him tips for tea and for vodkas but the men shared all they received among themselves, and gave nothing to the Tatar, but only laughed at him. And from poverty he was hungry, cold, and frightened....Now, when his whole body was aching and shivering, he ought to go into the hut and lie down to sleep; but he had nothing to cover him there, and it was colder than on the river-bank; here he had nothing to cover him either, but at least he could make up the fire....

In another week, when the floods were quite over and they set the ferry going, none of the ferrymen but Semyon would be wanted, and the Tatar would begin going from village to village begging for alms and for work. His wife was only seventeen; she was beautiful, spoilt, and shy; could she possibly go from village to village begging alms with her face unveiled? No, it was terrible even to think of that....

It was already getting light; the barge, the bushes of willow on the water, and the waves could be clearly discerned, and if one looked round there was the steep clay slope; at the bottom of it the hut thatched with dingy brown straw, and the huts of the village lay clustered higher up. The cocks were already crowing in the village.

The rusty red clay slope, the barge, the river, the strange, unkind people, hunger, cold, illness, perhaps all that was not real. Most likely it was all a dream, thought the Tatar. He felt that he was asleep and heard his own snoring....Of course he was at home in the Simbirsk province, and he had only to call his wife by name for her to answer; and in the next room was his mother....What terrible dreams there are, though! What are they for? The Tatar smiled and opened his eyes. What river was this, the Volga?

Snow was falling.

"Boat!" was shouted on the further side. "Boat!"

The Tatar woke up, and went to wake his mates and row over to the other side. The ferrymen came on to the river-bank, putting on their torn sheepskins as they walked, swearing with voices husky from sleepiness and shivering from the cold. On waking from their sleep, the river, from which came a breath of piercing cold, seemed to strike them as revolting and horrible. They jumped into the barge without hurrying themselves....The Tatar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed oars, which in the darkness looked like the claws of crabs; Semyon leaned his stomach against the tiller. The shout on the other side still continued, and two shots were fired from a revolver, probably with the idea that the ferrymen were asleep or had gone to the pot-house in the village.

"All right, you have plenty of time," said Semyon in the tone of a man convinced that there was no necessity in this world to hurry -- that it would lead to nothing, anyway.

The heavy, clumsy barge moved away from the bank and floated between the willow-bushes, and only the willows slowly moving back showed that the barge was not standing still but moving. The ferrymen swung the oars evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and, describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other. In the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through a cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes dreams in nightmares.

They passed beyond the willows and floated out into the open. The creak and regular splash of the oars was heard on the further shore, and a shout came: "Make haste! make haste!"

Another ten minutes passed, and the barge banged heavily against the landing-stage.

"And it keeps sprinkling and sprinkling," muttered Semyon, wiping the snow from his face; "and where it all comes from God only knows."

On the bank stood a thin man of medium height in a jacket lined with fox fur and in a white lambskin cap. He was standing at a little distance from his horses and not moving; he had a gloomy, concentrated expression, as though he were trying to remember something and angry with his untrustworthy memory. When Semyon went up to him and took off his cap, smiling, he said:

"I am hastening to Anastasyevka. My daughter's worse again, and they say that there is a new doctor at Anastasyevka."

They dragged the carriage on to the barge and floated back. The man whom Semyon addressed as Vassily Sergeyitch stood all the time motionless, tightly compressing his thick lips and staring off into space; when his coachman asked permission to smoke in his presence he made no answer, as though he had not heard. Semyon, lying with his stomach on the tiller, looked mockingly at him and said:

"Even in Siberia people can live -- can li-ive!"

There was a triumphant expression on Canny's face, as though he had proved something and was delighted that things had happened as he had foretold. The unhappy helplessness of the man in the foxskin coat evidently afforded him great pleasure.

"It's muddy driving now, Vassily Sergeyitch," he said when the horses were harnessed again on the bank. "You should have put off going for another fortnight, when it will be drier. Or else not have gone at all....If any good would come of your going -- but as you know yourself, people have been driving about for years and years, day and night, and it's alway's been no use. That's the truth."

Vassily Sergeyitch tipped him without a word, got into his carriage and drove off.

"There, he has galloped off for a doctor!" said Semyon, shrinking from the cold. "But looking for a good doctor is like chasing the wind in the fields or catching the devil by the tail, plague take your soul! What a queer chap, Lord forgive me a sinner!"

The Tatar went up to Canny, and, looking at him with hatred and repulsion, shivering, and mixing Tatar words with his broken Russian, said: "He is good ... good; but you are bad! You are bad! The gentleman is a good soul, excellent, and you are a beast, bad! The gentleman is alive, but you are a dead carcass....God created man to be alive, and to have joy and grief and sorrow; but you want nothing, so you are not alive, you are stone, clay! A stone wants nothing and you want nothing. You are a stone, and God does not love you, but He loves the gentleman!"

Everyone laughed; the Tatar frowned contemptuously, and with a wave of his hand wrapped himself in his rags and went to the campfire. The ferrymen and Semyon sauntered to the hut.

"It's cold," said one ferryman huskily as he stretched himself on the straw with which the damp clay floor was covered.

"Yes, its not warm," another assented. "It's a dog's life...."

They all lay down. The door was thrown open by the wind and the snow drifted into the hut; nobody felt inclined to get up and shut the door: they were cold, and it was too much trouble.

"I am all right," said Semyon as he began to doze. "I wouldn't wish anyone a better life."

"You are a tough one, we all know. Even the devils won't take you!"

Sounds like a dog's howling came from outside.

"What's that? Who's there?"

"It's the Tatar crying."

"I say. . . . He's a queer one!"

"He'll get u-used to it!" said Semyon, and at once fell asleep.

The others were soon asleep too. The door remained unclosed.


What Chekhov was writing about was life in extremis: how suffering throws into high relief the seeming madness of always the same struggle with the way things are. Or its exact opposite: the acquiescence into total passivity. One side or the other must be taken - either one chases after dreams on awakening from them and engages in the tug-of-war of trying to take what can only be given, rushing after something already lost, making preparations for an arrival that never comes. Or else one simply gives it all up and lives on a subsistence of cruelly diminished expectations. The advantage of being a stone is that one cannot be bruised. But it is clear whose side, the Gentleman's or Canny's, Chekhov is on.

This is what makes this story political - in fact it is a kind of political allegory. Chekhov's characters never say "why can't we love one another more?" Or "Why can't we make the world a better place for love?" They always say simply "Just look at us and the way we are living!" This is also true of "In Exile," but he powerfully shows us opposing styles of survival: how two very different people have chosen two very different ways of dealing with their distressing lives.


(1) Czech composer Leos Janacek made it into an extraordinary opera.
(2) Acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies (Russian: Главное Управление Исправительно-Трудовых Лагерей и колоний) of the NKVD