Russian essays and stories — Edition Insights

A Preface That Refuses to Take Sides

The dedication to Evan Charteris sets a tone of urbane self-deprecation. Baring jokes that calling his essays uninteresting would be a gross form of boasting, then illustrates with the German exam anecdote. He notes that his previous book was attacked from both left and right, which he takes as proof of fundamental impartiality. He sympathizes with Russian Liberals yet finds their English apologists talking “incredible nonsense.” The preface establishes that the essays are not political, but interested in Russians as human beings. This is not a neutral claim; it is a deliberate positioning that warns the reader against expecting partisan polemic or simple sympathy.

A Play Within the Collection: Poverty and Fortune

One excerpt presents a dramatic scene titled “The Ball in the Man’s House,” but it begins with a poor couple. Neighbors leave flowers, milk, bread, and a cheap cigar. The wife prays for her husband’s work; a grey figure (perhaps Fate) announces that two rich men are already seeking him. The Man, hungry and irritable, curses himself and kisses away his wife’s tears. He challenges Life: “Come out to battle, I shall conquer.” They play make-believe, building castles in the air, dancing wildly. The grey figure holds a candle that burns brightly. The scene is naive yet poignant, using simple props—a bottle of milk, a cigar—to stage hope and defiance.

The Ball: Waxwork Guests and a Foolish Polka

The next scene shifts to a huge room with columns, cold artificial light, and an orchestra of three black puppets playing a monotonous polka. Guests sit stiff as waxworks: old, painted, bedaubed, expressionless. The men are like expensive dolls in uniform or black and white; the women in silk and tinsel. The grey figure now has two-thirds of his candle consumed. Conversation among the guests is a parody of snobbery: they call it a great honour to be invited, pity those not asked, and insist the chairs were not gold but second-hand. The polka continues as young dancers disappear among columns. The contrast with the earlier poverty is stark—here, hollow luxury and envy replace genuine emotion.

Voice and Structure: From Essay to Drama

Baring moves between discursive essays and what appears to be a translated or adapted play. The preface’s conversational, anecdotal voice—self-mocking, aphoristic (“impartiality is unpopular”)—gives way to a stark, almost allegorical drama. The grey figure, the candle, the puppets, and the waxwork guests suggest a symbolic mode. The play’s dialogue is stilted, the polka “foolish,” the luxury gaudy. Baring does not explain the symbolism; he presents it. The reader must navigate between the preface’s claim of recording things seen and the clearly stylized, theatrical scenes. This structural juxtaposition—essayistic reflection alongside performed fable—is the collection’s distinctive method.

Baring’s collection rewards a reader who accepts its hybrid form: the essays provide context and commentary, the stories and drama enact scenes of Russian life that are neither documentary nor pure invention. The preface’s insistence on impartiality is a useful lens—not to find a hidden bias, but to watch how Baring lets contradictory impressions stand. The play excerpt, with its poor couple and hollow ball, suggests that fortune and its trappings are equally theatrical. A first reading might treat each piece as a self-contained observation, then notice how they echo and complicate each other.

That passage about the hollow ball of luxury stirred up my grandmother’s stories of old St. Petersburg, where glittering evenings masked empty rooms. It felt familiar, like reading The House of the Wolf: A Romance, where grand gestures and cold betrayals blurred into the same ache. Both books whisper about how easily we trade warmth for spectacle—a quiet, unmistakable melancholy. The House of the Wolf: A Romance — A Reader’s Guide caught that same ache for me once.