A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (by George Saunders)

(Book by George Saunders)

A Chain of Infection

War and Peace. Anna Karenina. These are Tolstoy’s masterpieces, ask anyone. Anyone other than Tolstoy, that is, who spent the latter half of his life denouncing both as awful art. What changed?

George Saunders may not be a Tolstoy scholar, but since 1996, he’s taught a class at Syracuse on Russian Golden Age short stories, each year probing them for insights on writing and what it’s for. Two decades later, he turned this class into a book: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Of course, War and Peace and Anna Karenina were slightly too wordy to make the cut, but of the seven stories in the book, it’s no coincidence that the two from Tolstoy were written by Tolstoy the Elder, Denouncer of Masterpieces. Tolstoy the Younger became Tolstoy the Elder after a classic midlife existential crisis (to put it far too lightly), but instead of buying a Harley or picking up rock climbing like a normal person, he opted to reevaluate his role as a writer and the purpose of art itself.

The new purpose of art he landed on? Infection. He lays this out in his 1897 book What is Art? He argues that art is a social technology whose purpose is infecting audiences with the emotional experiences of the artist. And this is prescriptive—for something to be art, it must do this. So if something meets this bar and becomes art, how do we judge its quality? Good art, he says, needs to be accessible enough to infect people regardless of their class, age, or gender. But not all emotional infections are equal; to Tolstoy, the highest art infects its audience with a feeling of religious brotherhood—of spiritual unity with all mankind and with God. This is followed by art which infects with universally experienced human emotions like love, grief, and compassion for suffering. Anything else makes for bad art (a category that includes much of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Dante).

Accessibility and emotional quality are where Tolstoy felt his masterpieces failed him. Sure, they transmitted emotion, but these were inaccessible emotions for many, transmitted via an even more inaccessible medium. If I were a 19th century Russian peasant, the only emotion a thousand-page cinderblock filled with shibboleths of the Russian aristocracy would infect me with is frustration (possibly why they eventually revolted).

George Saunders is skeptical of any prescriptive demands of fiction, and warns that demands like these are a step on the path to reactionary censorship. (Saunders doesn’t mention this explicitly, but I am reminded of Stalin’s imposition of Socialist Realism. Soviet Artists who wanted a better (but still not great) chance of not being purged had to produce art that conformed to four guidelines: (1) be relatable and understandable to the workers, (2) depict everyday life, (3) be realistic, and (4) support The State and The Party. Sound familiar? It’s as if Stalin—who almost certainly would have read _What is Art?—_adopted Tolstoy’s argument bar for bar before suddenly veering off at the last moment. There he is, sitting in a room dimly lit by candlelight through pipe smoke, twirling his mustache in thought: ‘Yes, yes, of course! Art should be understandable to the workers. And relatable too! And it should serve to infect them with the feeling of spiritual unity… TO THE STATE!!! Bwahahahahaha.’)

Although Saunders remains open minded as to the purpose of art, his writing is unmistakably influenced by Tolstoy’s ethos. His style is experimental, ironic, absurd, and funny, but his stories are built on a core of Tolstoyan empathy. The most important part of the introduction to A Swim is where Saunders writes this:

[The Russians] seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities (pg 5).

This is why Saunders teaches the Russians. Tolstoy the Elder was successful in what he set out to do—Saunders was infected.

The structure of A Swim doesn’t really lend itself to the format of an ACX book review. A lot of the funniest and most interesting things Saunders says don’t make sense unless you’ve read the story he expects you to have just read. Still, this is a book I can tell I’ll read many more times in my life, and it made chewing on important literature (that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise) as fun and easy as talking with an old friend. And I think people should read it, so I’m going to try my best. I want to walk through three of the seven stories in A Swim—Chekhov’s “In The Cart,” Turgenev’s “The Singers,” and Tolstoy’s “Master and Man”—and some of my favorite of the craft principles Saunders pulls from them. At the same time, I want to be stress testing this idea of fiction as a “vital moral-ethical tool” and how exactly it tries to accomplish being that.

Saunders was nearly forty before he quit his engineering job to teach writing. You can feel his past career in his approach to these stories; he analyzes them like an engineer analyzes a machine, sometimes exploding them into meticulous tables of their components, and often sidelining standard constructs of literary criticism like plot and theme in favor of more natural ones like meaningful action, escalation, and reader experience.

A story has no chance of infecting us or changing us if we don’t finish it, so how a story keeps us reading is just as important as whatever the overall effect of that reading is. In figuring out how these stories work, Saunders urges constant self-awareness to our internal state as we go—an awareness of exactly when we feel questions, emotions, friction, and delight. And the first story in the book is an exercise in that specifically.

A Swim Triptych

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The book begins on Chekhov, with a story called “In The Cart.” It’s a short story, (I suppose I should say “concise story”) and it doesn’t stand out in the way the other six do. This makes it a good test case—a foil for the others’ eccentricities—and an easy vehicle for Saunders to introduce some of the craft principles he explores throughout the book.

Most of A Swim is set up like this: We read a short story, then Saunders’ thoughts on it, and then an Afterthought, which is a more casual reflection on Saunders’ own life and writing. “In The Cart” is the sole exception to this rule. As an exercise in the aforementioned constant self-awareness, he breaks this first story up by page. After reading each page of the story, he asks us to take stock of what we know so far, what we’re curious about, and what we’re expecting. (Eventually he relents and goes to two pages at a time just in case we were beginning to look around for our Barnes and Noble receipt.)

The idea behind this self-awareness is to try to map our (constantly in flux) experience of the story onto the experience it seems Chekhov was intending, and then back-analyze the story to figure out why he made the sentence-by-sentence choices he did. Saunders visualizes this as a bouncer in “Club Story,” interrogating each little bit as to why they’re there—how do they contribute to the energy (or, in Tolstoy’s words, the infectiousness) of the story. Since the short story form requires, as he says, “ruthless efficiency,” it isn’t a stretch to go around like this asking for ID. The Club Story bouncer is one of dozens of A Swim’s little cementing images for its various craft principles. They aren’t necessarily profound images, but they’re fun and I’ve found they make his advice sticky.

The story begins with Marya, a jaded schoolteacher who, having just collected her modest salary from town and used it to buy sugar and flour, is now returning to her village in a cart driven by a peasant named Semyon.

Along the way, Marya fuzzily remembers her comfortable childhood in Moscow to a loving and cultured family. At some point during her teens, though, her parents die, their house is lost, and Marya loses contact with any remaining relatives. This forces her to become a schoolteacher in the country to support herself, where she is bitter and lonely. Despite her cultured education, she lives in poverty and is thus socially isolated from both the peasant families she teaches as well as the wealthier local officials and gentry.

Still driving, Marya and Semyon eventually cross paths with Hanov, a wealthy alcoholic himbo who Marya sometimes fantasizes about marrying and rescuing from himself. But she knows this is impossible, prevented by the gap between them in social class. Soon, the path to the village forks—one way is theoretically shorter but crosses through a river. Hanov opts for the longer route. Semyon thinks Hanov is a fool and says the river won’t be so deep. It was April; the river was indeed so deep, and Marya’s shoes and dress get soaked and the sugar and flour are ruined.

Finally, they arrive back at the village at exactly the same time as Hanov, and they all have to wait for a passing train at the crossing. As the train speeds by, Marya sees a woman on it who looks exactly like her mother. Immediately she is flooded with and restored by vivid memories of her childhood, of the life she should have had—her real life. This other one, the tedious one with the wet dresses and ruined sugar, she feels has only been a dream. She is so filled with joy she begins to cry and the trees and sky seem colorful again. Like Wile E Coyote speeding off a cliff, Marya is briefly weightless. But the train passes and she is forced to look down (triggering gravity, as we know) to see herself falling back into soggy bags of flour.

Saunders says a story is “a limited set of elements that we read against one another.” We do this reading-against-one-another very naturally, being hardwired to constantly be scanning for patterns and making comparisons and predictions. This happens often below the conscious level too, so a story—especially one seeking to serve as a “vital moral-ethical tool”—can take advantage of this fact to generate energy useful for meaning or infection. Saunders gives the example of a table holding a gun, a grenade, a hatchet, and a ceramic duck.

If the duck is at the center of the table, surrounded closely by the weapons, we feel: that duck is in trouble. If the duck, the gun, and the grenade have the hatchet pinned down in one corner, we may feel the duck to be leading the modern weaponry (the gun, the grenade) against the (old-fashioned) hatchet. If the three weapons are each hanging precipitously over one edge of the table and the duck is facing them, we might understand the duck to be a radical pacifist who’s finally had enough.

Point taken, but personally, I think Saunders doesn’t know how violent ducks are. If I saw the duck on the table surrounded by the gun, grenade, and hatchet, I’d feel I was the one in trouble.

In Chekhov’s case, his table is holding Marya, Semyon, and Hanov. The story is really a portrait of Marya and the particular flavor of her isolation as a rural raznochinets. Raznochintsy (raznochinets is singular; raznochintsy is plural) were people who didn’t neatly fall under any of the four main hereditary social ranks in Russia at the time—nobility, clergy, merchants/townspeople, and peasants—so this already creates some degree of isolation. (Chekhov himself actually belonged to this class.) But raznochintsy were mainly an urban phenomenon, so Marya, as a rural schoolteacher, experienced multiple layers of isolation, with one downstream effect of this being difficulty in finding love.

You don’t actually need to know any of this historical context to understand the isolation though, and Chekhov doesn’t come out and say it either. It pops out of the story efficiently by arranging Marya on that table alongside Semyon and Hanov. And this energizes the climax of the story: her Wile E Coyote moment is meaningful to her because she misses her mother, yes, but also because she misses the feeling of social belonging now unavailable to her.

Reading A Swim, it seems clear to me that Chekhov is Saunders’ favorite. He opens with Chekhov; the title comes from Chekhov; he speaks with the least reservation about Chekhov; and Chekhov is the only author in A Swim with three stories to his name. Before I get to why I think that is, here is what Tolstoy wrote in his diary after reading “In The Cart.”

In terms of artfulness, superb, but it becomes rhetoric as soon as he tries to give the story meaning (Tolstoy, vol. 53)

Tolstoy’s criticism is that Chekhov is being too heavy handed in his attempt to give the story meaning, instead of allowing it to naturally arise from the story’s transmitted feeling. I don’t agree with this, and I don’t think Saunders would either. In fact, Saunders’ consistent impression of Chekhov is the exact opposite. He says Chekhov “[sets] some feature of the world in the middle of a room and invite[s] us to walk around it, looking at it from different angles.” Tolstoy, on the other hand, is the one whose stories seem to have a more fixed angle. His aesthetic theory insists that art must transmit feeling, and good art must transmit specific types of feeling. I’d presume Tolstoy’s intention in creating art was that it be “good” by his own definition, so it seems likely that he built his stories with a predetermined destination (emotional outcome) in mind. Chekhov’s art feels more fluid in its creative intent.

But this brings up an important criticism of the idea of fiction as an effective or valuable moral-ethical tool at all: Stories aren’t making ethical arguments in any objective way. How can you be confident that the direction of the emotions they transmit is truth-tracking at all?

Saunders acknowledges this. He says:

Because the writer invents all the elements, a story really isn’t in a position to “prove” anything. (If I make a dollhouse out of ice cream and put it in the sun, it doesn’t prove the notion “Houses Melt”.) (pg 339)

So why should we care about a story that conveys Marya’s isolation as a raznochinet as opposed to, say, a first-hand memoir from someone in a similar position? Both might make us feel the same thing, but one at least corresponds to reality, which makes narrative-as-propaganda at least somewhat harder.

I think it comes down to energy. There is something objectively real about the loneliness of the raznochintsy. But for a first-hand account to have an upper hand over a fictional story in terms of moral-ethical value, it needs to be completely true. Chekhov was a member of the raznochintsy, and Marya certainly contained a fragment of him, but maybe she was a composite character, containing fragments of people he knew closely as well. And to insist that a narrative be true in order to be reliable at containing truth kind of defeats the power of the table metaphor.

You wouldn’t feel threatened by or for the duck if the grenade was only near someone he knew and if, in addition to the hatchet and gun next to him, there was also a slinky, wine glass, teddy bear, candlestick, and banana peel.

There is something valuable about the imagined to the true. And truth can be served by the efficiency and intentionality of the elements that fiction allows.

The next story that Saunders presents, however, feels like part of a dialectic with “In The Cart” on the topic of efficiency (like they were placed next to each other for a reason *cough cough*)

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A Swim includes only a single story of Turgenev’s, called “The Singers”. It’s about a peasant singing competition in the pub of a dingy village. The narrator—a wealthy traveling hunter—functions solely as an observer. And let me tell you… this guy does not mess around when it comes to observing. The way he scans facial features into his database would make Palantir jealous. Take for example his description of The Wild Gentleman (essentially the Simon Cowell of this singing competition’s judge panel):

…a man of about forty, broad-shouldered, with broad cheekbones, a low forehead, narrow Tartar eyes, a short, flat nose, a square chin, and black shiny hair, hard as bristles. The expression of his face, swarthy with a leaden hue, and especially of his pale lips, might almost have been called ferocious, if it had not been so calmly reflective… He wore a sort of threadbare frock coat with shiny copper buttons; an old black silk handkerchief was wrapped around his massive neck. (pg 70)

Excessive right? Well what if I told you the entire first half of the story consists of basically just this (along with a bit of biography) for the pub and every even slightly significant character.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Before that, Turgenev sets the singing competition up, makes you think it’s about to start, and THEN spends half of the story pointing out how flat everyone’s noses are.

It’s exhausting, which is why Saunders included it in the first place; it gave him an opportunity to explore the way a story creates energy and transforms it into meaning. And for a story hoping to be a “vital moral-ethical tool,” digressive text walls of physical features seem self-defeating, so how does this story make do anyway?

To answer that, let’s skip straight to the singing.

Introducing first, singing out of the blue corner: I won’t bother telling you his weight, he’s from out of town, he’s cocky, he’s flashy, it’s… The Contractor.

And in the red corner, your hometown favorite: he’s a sensitive guy with an artist’s soul and—oh look, he’s visibly shaking. That’s true passion folks!—They call him The Turk, it’s… Yashka.

The Contractor goes first. He sings an upbeat dance tune, showing off constantly with all the flair of an A-list pop star trying a unique spin on the national anthem. I’m talking “tongue-clickings and drummings [and] frantic throat play.” Everyone in the pub has a great time and is left impressed. Booby (obnoxious fool, contest judge) even drunkenly declares him winner without waiting to hear Yashka at all.

Now Yashka looks sick. He almost backs out but Cowell forces him to begin. His first note is off-key and barely audible. His second is firmer but still trembling, but the entire pub is now entranced. He sings a slow and mournful song, and slowly gains his confidence until he loses himself in the passionate emotion of his song. Something about the performance brings to the narrator a forgotten memory of a seagull he once saw spreading its wings towards the blood-red sunset. Most of the audience, Cowell included, are moved to tears.

“Yashka,” declares Cowell.

Saunders proposes this model of how friction works in a story:

He says imagine, while reading a story, that you are pulling a cart labeled “Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing.” Consciously or not, we are constantly noticing tiny sources of friction in a story. Saunders refers to these as “non-normative aspects of the story”—things that call attention to themselves through some level of excess or implausibility or difficulty to parse. He gives the famous opening line of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an example:

When Kafka writes, “Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams… transformed in his bed into a [gigantic insect],” you don’t say, “No, he didn’t Franz,” and throw the book across the room. You add “impossible incident: man just turned into bug,” to your TICHN cart then enter a period of “waiting to see.” (pg 85)

Basically, you might experience the friction as a small drop in energy, but as long as your energy hasn’t dropped to zero, you tentatively accept this source of friction and wait to see if it pays off.

So, halfway through reading “The Singers,” my TICHN cart was filled to the brim with descriptions and digressions. Saunders asks: Do these earn their keep? Do they serve “the heart of the story”? If so, how?

He offers two somewhat compelling defenses of this friction, but before I get to those I want to talk about one of my favorite parts in all of A Swim. Saunders accepts that Turgenev’s writing is clunky, awkward, and at times a slog. Still, the singing competition itself is gripping and emotionally resonant. Saunders establishes a meta-analogy between the singing competition and Turgenev’s writing style itself. He points out that the Contractor’s strength is pure technical skill; his singing is flashy and filled with upbeat fast-paced energy. Yashka’s singing, on the other hand, is flawed, and drawn out, and nervous. But The Contractor’s ceiling is lower; he can entertain a room with a *frictionless* performance, but this performance cannot make that same room recall a seagull bathing in scarlet sunlight or begin to cry. Yashka’s could. And it seems this wasn’t in spite of Yashka’s flaws, but that it required them.

I found that beautiful. Saunders doesn’t think this was Turgenev’s intent (Turgenev likely didn’t think his writing style was all THAT flawed), but I think it’s almost too perfect—that some part of Turgenev deep down must have intended this analogy all along.

Now back to Saunders’ defenses of the descriptions, the main sources of friction in the story. The first is practical: the story is about a singing competition—a medium that doesn’t quite translate to the page. (You’ve got a face for radio and a voice for a 19th century Russian short story.) Without being able to hear the singing, the only way to continually gauge how the contest is going is through the reactions of the various characters in the pub. So then the many physical descriptions and biographical digressions give texture to this panel of judges. We weigh the opinion of Booby differently than that of The Wild Gentleman based on what we are told about each of them.

This is one spot in the book I would push back on some. Saunders makes a good case for why the many biographical digressions, that at first seem superfluous, might earn their keep, but he seems to lump these in with the physical details under the umbrella of “descriptions.”

He addresses this objection partially—acknowledging the concern that the above function could have been served perfectly well in a much more efficient way, but kind of just “leaves this as an exercise for the reader,” with a suggestion to copy the story and attempt to cut it down and see just how much you think you can remove without removing “some of the mysterious beauty that, in spite of its wordiness, is there in the original.”

The other (more compelling) defense Saunders gives for the physical descriptions is historical. The collection this story is from, A Sportsman’s Sketches, was written as more than just a collection of fiction. Turgenev was using his short stories as a piece of anthropological documentary. Many of his fellow aristocrats would’ve had little to no first-hand experience of the lives of the peasants and serfs he depicts. The traveling wealthy hunter was Turgenev’s self-insert, and this was exactly the way he became closely acquainted in the first place with the world he depicts in A Sportsman’s Sketches. So when he describes in meticulous detail the village and pub and outfits and features of everyone in it, he is trying to depict an unknown world as accurately as possible to the reading classes he wrote for.

In this way, the digressive text walls of physical features aren’t as self-defeating for a “vital moral-ethical tool” as they seem. In fact, Turgenev’s depiction of the serfs and peasants was especially humanizing in a way that I really appreciate, especially when compared to Tolstoy’s.

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The third and final story I want to cover, “Master and Man,” comes from Tolstoy. (Tolstoy 3: The one with the Russian Bear?)

We already know his agenda for the story—does that undermine it?

The Seinfeld episode you’ve been watching just has ended and the laugh track fades into a funky slap-bass tune. Soon the credits end and the slap-bass is replaced by violin, slow, quivering. The screen splits in two along the diagonal. In the top right appears a young boy, bald, in a teal gown. In the bottom left is an elderly dog in a rusty cage. Both sets of eyes, one green, one milky, are wide and pleading. Sarah McLachlan appears in the middle.

“Liam here has cancer,” she says. “Biscuit? Abused.” The violins multiply.

“Liam’s one wish is for a dog. And Biscuit here wishes only for an owner who loves him. They could be united, but only with your help. For a small monthly pledge of just twelve dollars, we can unite Liam and Biscuit and many more like them. Please.”

How do you feel?

This kind of thing seems to have fallen out of style since the 90’s and 00’s. A 2022 paper reviewing decades of research on the efficacy of ads like these found the sad-face formula to often backfire. It stirs sympathy, but it also causes viewers to feel manipulated, and these effects can cancel each other out when it comes to donations.

Tolstoy insists the mission of art is empathic infection—not far off the mission of an airtime-saving combined St. Jude/ASPCA commercial. And Tolstoy is specific about which emotions good art infects its audience with. Earlier, when he seemed to criticize the heavy-handedness of “In The Cart,” he made himself vulnerable to a similar criticism. His audience, even at the time of writing “Master and Man,” would have known what emotions he wanted to infect them with. If this audience feels they are being manipulated, this works against him. Some level of suspension of disbelief is required for an audience to feel for Marya as if she’s real, and if Chekhov was actually as clumsy at infusing his story with meaning as Tolstoy suggests, this can chip away at the suspension of belief and pull the audience out of the story. A similar immersion concern could be raised for Turgenev: Particularity and detail are crucial for making imagined worlds feel real, but too much detail (say, fifteen consecutive descriptors for a single face) is potentially bad friction-management and could also pull the reader out of the story.

So if Tolstoy wants to optimize his stories for emotional infection, he has to be elegant in his moralizing and careful in his chosen details. Does he do this successfully in “Master and Man”?

This is by far the longest story in the book, so I will keep a summary brief:

Rich-guy Vasili Andreevich has clearly just read The Art of The Deal. He’s pitched an extreme low-ball offer (using church funds, no less) to some naive young landowner who is selling a grove. The landowner counteroffered only slightly more, so Vasili stands to profit massively from the purchase. The only problem is a rumor that another party will be making a reasonable bid soon, so Vasili leaves to finalize the purchase with the seller as soon as possible. He brings his peasant servant, Nikita, with him, who is frequently cheated and taken advantage of by Vasili but has no real other options.

They set out on a cold winter day in a sledge drawn by a horse named Mukhorty. Nikita is under-dressed for the weather. On the way they lose the road in the snow and become lost before eventually finding a village where they stop to ask for directions. They’re invited to stay and leave the village in the morning, but Vasili worries any further delay could cause the grove to be lost, so they set out again. Soon they get lost again and eventually arrive back in the same village. This time they stop to warm up. Their hosts urge them to stay—the snow has picked up and it’s close to dusk—but Vasili stubbornly insists they must be going. Soon after leaving for the second time, the snow becomes a blizzard and they are lost once again. Now they have no choice but to try to hunker down in place for the night. The situation they’re in is dire, and Nikita, resigned to this, goes to sleep. Vasili can’t sleep though, and decides to take Mukhorty and ride off to save himself. But the snow is too deep for Mukhorty to navigate, and he bucks Vasili off before running into the storm. Vasili wanders, terrified and disoriented, before arriving back at the sledge where he finds Nikita still alive but beginning to freeze in his shabby clothes.

Vasili opens his coat and lies down on Nikita to try to warm him up. He is overcome with joy and humility and stays put, feeling that “he was Nikita and Nikita was he.” In the morning, Nikita is found and dug out from the snow, having been kept alive by the warmth of the now-dead Vasili. The story closes with a brief recounting of Nikita’s life and eventual death.

Hearing it in short summary, Vasili’s transformation feels unrealistic. To read the story itself, this is not the case.

The climactic final act of the story, beginning with Vasili abandoning Nikita, is told entirely from Vasili’s perspective. You are made to identify with Vasili (even if you dislike him), and Tolstoy’s goal is for some fragment of Vasili’s transformation to be transferred to the reader in this identification. If Tolstoy had rendered Vasili’s change unbelievable (unearned by the story) his goal of infection would be sabotaged. Saunders says this of the moment when Vasili is about to be transformed:

Tolstoy has put himself in a tough spot. He’s made a convincing stinker. […] We fear a facile transformation. If Tolstoy suggests an implausible method of change, the story will reveal itself as propaganda and fall apart. (pg 239)

So what makes the transformation believable and prevents the story from feeling like the St. JSPCA commercial? To Saunders, it has to do with the nature of Vasili’s transformation being less like becoming someone else and more like having his same energy redirected. Vasili’s energy is constantly restless. He prides himself in always staying busy, and this is part of how he justifies to himself that he deserves his wealth and status. This restless energy is why he couldn’t sleep and why he rode off, leaving Nikita behind. But after being bucked by Mukhorty, Vasili is forced to begin to accept that most likely he, Nikita, and Mukhorty are all going to die. Saunders:

In this way, the border of the Nation of Vasili gets moved out just enough to encompass Nikita… and Nikita gets the full benefit of Vasili’s energy. (pg 241)

So his restless energy is channeled towards trying to warm the freezing Nikita up. And once Vasili is pressed into Nikita, the feeling of unity between them only grows stronger until the idea of remaining there and dying to keep Nikita warm fills Vasili with peace and joy. To Saunders, this is an elegant solution to Tolstoy’s tough spot, but also a beautiful idea: that even a large personal transformation is only as far away as channeling one’s natural energy in a different direction.

Just as important to Tolstoy’s ability to create believable transformation is the idea of causality. Causality is crucial to both immersion and meaning. A deus ex machina ending can ruin an otherwise fantastic story because it wasn’t believably caused by what preceded it. And causality also infuses otherwise separate events with meaning. Saunders gives this example:

“The queen died, and then the king died” (E.M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.” …Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter. (pg 227)

To Saunders, Tolstoy is a master of causality and “Master and Man” a masterclass. In my short summary, I say simply that Vasili and Nikita get lost repeatedly, but these aren’t just incidental. It would be infuriating if something like that just happened three times, but Tolstoy has the story cause them to happen in subtle ways. Saunders explores the causality of each; the second one, for example, happens while Vasili is driving the sledge. They approach another sledge filled with drunken peasants. Vasili decides to race them. The peasants (who Vasili and Nikita have been gaining on the entire time) are entirely unaware a race is even taking place. This behavior follows from Vasili’s characterization as a competitive and prideful cheat, but the result of the “race” is that “Vasili is fired up by the mere appearance of competition,” and after (in his mind) winning, he “drove on more boldly without examining the way marks, urging on the horse and trusting to him.” The entire story is tightly knit together in this way.

But despite these virtues of Tolstoy’s writing that help prevent his writing from becoming didactic or preachy, he doesn’t avoid it entirely. One persistent criticism Saunders levels at Tolstoy’s writing is in his depiction of peasants.

Both in “Master and Man” and “Alyosha the Pot”—his other story in A Swim—Tolstoy renders peasants as simple and saintly and perfectly obedient. This is especially frustrating in “Alyosha the Pot,” where Alyosha is so obedient that we feel he’s a pushover to the detriment of those around him—he loves this girl named Ustinia and she loves him, but when his father says he can’t marry her (and insults her in the process), he’s basically like “Aw man. Guess we gotta let that idea go.” But we know he cares because later that day he bursts out in tears. This is frustrating. It feels like Alyosha is failing to stick up for himself and, importantly, Ustinia, but at the same time it feels like Tolstoy is putting Alyosha’s behavior forward as ideal and almost Christ-like.

Saunders points out that Nikita’s death is written with none of the same internality afforded to Vasili’s. Nikita acts just as passively fine with dying as Alyosha does with being disallowed marriage to Ustinia. Nikita is basically characterized as flawless—he is said to have had past issues with alcoholism, to be fair, but the only time this matters is a moment of temptation while warming up in the town that Nikita doesn’t succumb to! His wife is implied to be cheating on him and he doesn’t seem all that angry about it. He takes his abuse by Vasili in stride and is consistently depicted as especially kind to animals. So what gives?

Tolstoy was incredibly sympathetic to the plight of the peasants and the earlier serfs, and maybe these were calculated moves to increase sympathy for them among the aristocracy—but then he would be guilty of what he accuses Chekhov of—or maybe he struggled to understand the peasants well enough to render their behavior or internality as fully human.

Either way, the reader is not made to feel unified in empathy with Nikita directly; instead the operation passes through Vasili. To read “Master and Man” is to be unified in empathy with someone unified in empathy with someone else. Which is a shame considering Tolstoy’s ethos of transmitting feelings of universal spiritual unity.

A Swim in Another Pond

In 1972, philosopher Peter Singer imagined a child drowning and, in doing so, changed the world forever. His essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (one of only a few essays written by someone not named Scott Alexander with which I’m sure most in the ACX community are familiar) is a holy text of Effective Altruism. He proposes a thought experiment that goes something like this:

It is a cool morning. You are on your way to work (say, fancy business work) and you pass a shallow pond. You see in the pond a toddler, flailing and bobbing in and out of the water, seemingly going to drown. There is no one else around. You can wade in and save the child, but your fancy business shoes/suit will get wet and muddy and you will certainly be late.

“What should you do?” Singer asks.

The answer, to nearly everyone, is obvious: you wade in. And not only that—choosing otherwise would make you a monster. What is the moral intuition this experiment reveals? Singer puts it this way:

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

Seems pretty uncontroversial. That is, until what Singer does next. He argues that most of us find ourselves in a morally equivalent situation to this every day, but we don’t stop. We keep walking to our fancy business jobs, clock in right on time, and never think anything of it. “What? How?” ask panicked freshman Introduction to Ethics students everywhere. Well, each year millions of young children die deaths that were entirely preventable if not for lack of money. In 2024, EA organization GiveWell estimated that the cost to prevent one Nigerian child from dying of malaria was $3,000. In contrast, the average American in 2024 spent $3,939 dining out at restaurants.

“That’s completely different!” the students say. “You said there was no one else around, but anyone can donate to GiveWell. And why should I care as much about someone on the other side of the world as someone next door to me?”

Singer sighs.

His essay offers convincing arguments that neither proximity nor the number of people in the same position are morally relevant in the situation. Since most of the audience will be familiar with these, I won’t repeat them here.

Singer’s key insight is that the emotional weight of proximity—the distance bias—clouds rational moral decision-making. The EA movement is built on counteracting biases like this through careful deliberation of the consequences of their altruism, optimizing for overall good regardless of where (or when) the person receiving the altruism lives. Because empathy seemingly depends on so many unreliable variables—proximity, similarity, contemporality—moral action that relies on empathy is decidedly not optimized for overall good.

Except notice what Singer is really doing here.

Why do we help the drowning child at all?

It can’t be because of our fundamental instinct for the value of human life, or else the distance bias wouldn’t be a problem at all. The equivalence of the malaria and drowning cases would be plainly and intuitively obvious to us. It wouldn’t need pointed out by a philosopher in the first place. (And it certainly wouldn’t cause such a stir for a philosopher to do so.)

No, I’d argue the reason we have such a strong instinct to help the drowning child is because the proximity and particularity of the situation creates an empathy response in us. Empathy is the most prominent proposed proximate mechanism (immediate cause) for why altruism happens at all. If you see a friend yawn, you are likely to yawn. If you are told “A child somewhere in Nigeria yawned”, you are not.

One reading treats this as a defect in our empathy-reliant moral foundation. Another treats a strong empathy response as a unique benefit of perceived proximity.

From these two interpretations follow two ways of mitigating the distance bias problem.

1. To reduce reliance of moral action on empathy. (The standard EA/rationalist approach does this, typically through some consequentialist framework.)

2. To reduce the weakening of empathy caused by lack of proximity and particularity (aka to reduce othering).

I understand the disposition towards the first way among the rationalist and EA movements. Paul Bloom argues in his book, Against Empathy, that empathy is like a spotlight that shines on individuals. Because of this it doesn’t scale well to groups—especially when the groups are numbered in the millions or billions, which humans already have very little intuition for beyond “a lot”. On top of this and the distance bias, empathy is a finite resource with diminishing returns; the fortieth school shooting you learn about doesn’t affect you in the same way as the fourth. Also, empathy is parochial—it relies on similarity—so is weak to ways humans put people in boxes labeled “other”: racism, sexism, classism, etc. The cumulative effect of these problems is that when empathy is used as the basis for decision-making, the outcomes are measurably worse than when using what Bloom calls rational compassion—still caring (despite what the NY Times/NY Post would have you believe), but channeling that deliberately in the most effective directions.

But even if you unreservedly agree with Bloom, pragmatically, the majority of people are not likely to change this default setting any time soon, and in the meantime we should steer empathy-based decision-making in more effective directions.

Even many who are moved by Singer’s argument are not rejecting the role of emotional empathy in their decision making entirely. Instead, they are moved by seeing stripped bare the inconsistencies in how their empathy is activated. But to get people to see this, Singer had to first have them read a piece of micro-fiction designed to make imagined empathy-driven action obvious. Then by analogy he showed that this empathy is just as deserved by someone very different. The drowning child thought experiment only works as well as it does because empathy is trainable. Empathy is the initial source of the moral action, Singer has just redirected it through analogy to a non-obvious target, someone far too “other” (in space, in culture, in language) to induce strong empathy without external influence.

But throughout A Swim, Saunders treats fiction as a means of “un-othering.” All of the techniques in the book serve to make fiction a more powerful un-othering tool.

The careful choice of details that make an imagined world feel real and the sentence-level execution that allows one sentence or idea to flow into another both serve immersion. This immersion breaks down the barriers between self and imagined other. The particularity of the characters helps the reader inhabit them and charges a story’s emotional stakes with resonance. And tight systems of causality make change happening to these characters feel earned, which counteracts the potential for a reader to feel manipulated, especially in cases when the story has a particular emotional agenda.

If fiction is an effective tool for un-othering, as Saunders believes and Tolstoy demands, then fiction can be used to channel empathy towards non-obvious targets. I don’t see why the two ways of mitigating the distance problem need to be a dichotomy. Even if rational compassion is optimal, not everyone will resonate with that way. I don’t see anti-EA thinkpieces (lobbing misguided accusations of cold, Spock-like indifference) going away any time soon. Pragmatically, writing fiction that fosters empathy specifically for those who could most effectively benefit from it has value. (This recent piece by Natalie Cargill is a good example of what I have in mind.)

But there are serious objections to this idea, and I want to address a few of them:

“Are you suggesting reading literary fiction makes you a better person?”

No, of course not! Not on its own, at least. To say so would be like saying that consuming some extra protein makes your muscles bigger. The extra protein doesn’t do anything if you aren’t going to the gym and tearing your muscles down to use it. Even if reading literary fiction were guaranteed to increase empathy, empathy alone doesn’t make you a better person—compassionate actions do. But at least for me there is a relationship between how healthy and protein-rich my diet is and how motivated I am to go to the gym.

“Is there actually good evidence that reading literary fiction increases empathy at all?”

Maybe. One issue is possible selection bias—even if the two are correlated, maybe more empathetic people are more likely to read literary fiction in the first place. A widely covered 2013 study by Kidd and Castano ran randomized controlled experiments and found that even short periods of time spent reading literary fiction improved theory of mind—the ability to understand and empathize with others’ mental states. (They even used stories from Chekhov.) But there have been attempts to replicate this finding since, with varying levels of success, and there is still no real consensus.

Better evidence might be historical. One case study: the best selling novel of the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its depiction of slavery had an enormous effect on shifting public opinion in the North. Even Tolstoy praised it directly, calling it one of the highest examples of art because it flowed from love of God and man. But empathy flows from un-othering, and the legacy of UTC in this regard is complicated. While it undoubtedly helped the abolitionist cause, it solidified a number of enduring racial stereotypes, and the Northern sentiment it generated would be better described as pity-like sympathy than empathy. It is no wonder Tolstoy loved it so much: Stowe’s depiction of Uncle Tom suffers from the same type of othering as Tolstoy’s Nikita or Alyosha. They are all written as saint-like in their unwavering subservience. This makes them good propaganda, but not good empathy machines. James Baldwin pans UTC for only being able to advocate for slaves by first removing their humanity to make them into sinless martyrs. But still, zoomed-out, Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems almost certain to have historically led more white readers to recognize the full humanity of black people, despite the book’s short-sighted flaws. I’d argue sympathy may be a flawed, proto-empathy that can evolve into it, and by helping prop up the abolitionist movement, UTC created conditions that eventually helped lead to that evolution occurring on a larger scale.

But if you were Stowe or Tolstoy, writing to advocate for classes of people who had been thoroughly othered by much of society, to rationally suggest to a reader that their compassion be extended beyond the current scope of their empathy—for many readers—would have been futile. But to engineer a story that, even only by a little, redirects that compassion towards those who could use it most would be to do something worthwhile.

Today, the EA movement advocates for classes of people and beings who have been thoroughly othered by much of society—children dying in poverty of malaria 6,000 miles away, chickens trapped in bodies they cannot use. The vision of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is writing that can cut against this by moving empathy’s spotlight in better directions.

Even Vasili, in the final act of Master and Man, did not initially lie down on Nikita to die. He did it simply to warm him up. Only then, with their bodies pressed against each other and hearing nothing but Nikita’s breathing, did Vasili’s notion of Nikita as “other” begin to evaporate. Without it, lying still as the snowstorm licked frozen his legs and gloveless hand—dying for Nikita—became as obvious and unhesitating to Vasili as wading into a shallow pond after a drowning child. Vasili reaches a stiff and purple hand out and pulls the child, sputtering pond muck, onto the shore, and sees that the child was always him and dies unafraid.