Harmonious Compositions: Korolenko's Siberian Stories

Harmonious Compositions: Korolenko's Siberian Stories Radha Balasubramanian University of Nebraska Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853-1921) turned his personal experiences as a political prisoner in Siberia into short stories that champion the talents of Siberia's ordinary people. These stories ofSiberia have been noted by critics for their techniques of composition. His contemporaries like A. P. Chekhov and V. M. Garshin praise his craftsmanship and skill to compose aesthetically appealing short stories.1 Leighton shows how Korolenko, in order to reveal and document facts about different human beings, utilizes various literary devices such as particularized narration (skaz), allegory, contrast, parallel, and lyrical description.2 According to him, each story is like an "elegant, polished, graceful and harmonious composition" where the various literary devices are used "instinctively" (201). But I think that Korolenko organizes nature description, surroundings, atmosphere, and action ofthe narrative to complement the choice of heroes deliberately to create the harmony that Lunacharskii discusses (6-8). My essay indeed takes off from Lunacharskii's abstract observations and shows that Korolenko deftly employs narrative techniques and achieves a harmony between the narrator and character and their relationship to nature. Korolenko's Siberian stories form a homogeneous group of sixteen stories written in two cycles. The first one, made up of "The Strange One" (1880), "Iashka" (1880), "The Murderer" (1882), "Makar's Dream" (1883), "Sokolinets" (1885), "The Prison" (1886), "Fedor Bespriiutnyi" (1886), "The Circassian" (1888), was written during and immediately after Korolenko's exile. The other cycle, which consists of "Temptation" (1891), "At-Davan" (1892), "Marusia's Settlement" (1899), "Lights" (1900), "The Last Ray" (1900), "The Frost" (1900-1901), "The Coachmen, Lords" (1900), "The Feudal Lords" (1904), was written later in life after a lapse of a decade or more since his exile to Siberia. Clearly, Siberia as a theme continues to occupy Korolenko throughout his writing career; even in the 1890s he goes back to his notes and memories to reconstruct a few more pieces about it. It is only after he exhausts the stories of Siberia in 1904—the year that his last story ofSiberia ("The Feudal Lords") was written—that he turns to writing his memoirs, A History of My Contemporary (1905-1921). After 1905 there is a sharp decline in the number of stories that Korolenko 201 202Rocky Mountain Review wrote, suggesting that his motivation and inspiration for writing fiction diminished. The stories concentrate on portraying the Siberian inhabitants and their life styles. Sometimes the bureaucratic corruption reigning in the administration in Siberia is exposed (e.g., "The Murderer," "The Feudal Lords," "The Coachmen, Lords"). In others, the characters want to be free from the dreary surroundings (e.g., "The Strange One," "Iashka," "Fedor Bespriiutnyi"). The relationship between the people and the intelligentsia becomes an important problem in some stories (e.g., "The Strange One," "The Frost," "Fedor Bespriiutnyi"). Whatever the main conflict in the stories, Korolenko usually highlights the talents that the simple people in Siberia possess. Korolenko's main concern is to reveal the totality ofhuman beings—their strengths and weaknesses. The characters invariably live close to nature and find in it the will and strength to live. They constantly interact with nature, while they also have an independent existence of their own. The moral quest of the narrator, who often is a participant, takes the form of a search in those faraway places for protagonists among the simple folk whose strength, humility, courage, and independence he admires but does not yet fully comprehend. Once he locates them, his poetic prose vividly portrays these people in harmony with the formidable, hitherto unexplored, potentially rich landscape of Siberia—in other words he draws a parallel between the "lives of nature and man."3 Then the narrator begins investigating what drives them to live the life that they have chosen and he finds that a deep underlying code governs their actions. In the process he understands that "heroic moment in the simple man's life"4 which has shaped the further course of his own life. These revelations of the crises in the lives of his characters are presented through a personalized narrator. The narrator depicts the characters and the scene in both firstperson and third-person...