How George Saunders’s Analysis of Russian Masters Provides a Critical Language for Audio Narratives

In 2022, George Saunders published A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book that shared his technique and structure for critical reading and analysis of critical works by a quartet of Russian masters, offering a guide not only to would-be novelists and short fiction writers, but to those of us in a field struggling to find a critical language.

Saunders’s tone in A Swim in a Pond is both gentle and rigorous. He acknowledges that the first encounter with a text is likely to be superficial. We go from the beginning to the end, and we have some idea of what happened to the characters, but we are missing the subtle patterns that make the story larger than its narrative envelope.

The same applies to radio and audio, especially Golden Age radio, which was entirely ephemeral—it had a broadcast window, and then it disappeared. Happily, today’s media environment permits the recovery and re-engagement with these works, which reveal astonishing subtlety and intent in the face of rigid deadlines and the commercially sponsored context in which they were produced and broadcast.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain suggests that Russian literature is “beyond category” a term first used to describe jazz great Duke Ellington.

Norman Corwin’s On a Note of Triumph is one example of a work that rewards closer critical scrutiny. Commissioned by CBS to mark V-E Day, and the end of World War II in Europe, it was expected to be a propagandist message about the unstoppable moral might of democracy and the Allied victory. Instead, Corwin, a social activist, created multi-layered, sweeping interrogation of our values, our agenda, war, and democracy itself.

In 1945 there was no model for audio documentary; producers did not think in terms of “sound art”; and there was no tradition of using the form to query the principles of democracy. Saunders writes about the ways in which Chekhov and Tolstoy turn stories about ostensibly quotidian activities into explorations of class and humanity: Tolstoy’s Master and Man follows the ill-fated journey of a prosperous and self-important innkeeper and merchant and the unlucky laborer (because “he was not drunk that day”) who winds up as his driver. Similarly, Chekhov’s “In the Cart” charts the inner life of a schoolteacher who has known better days as she runs errands and has various encounters that test her sense of herself.

On a Note of Triumph proceeds in Acts, some presented as slice-of-life moments—the first, the expected boisterous, joyful rejoicing at the death of Hitler (we are invited to dance on his grave and simultaneous celebrations public and intimate all over the globe. But in the midst of this, thin uneasy strings deposit us in a nebulous nowhere, where await the voices of soldiers asking how we got to this point, whether it would happen again, and what the cost was.

The piece broadens again into a compressed history of the war, and the rise of a dictator in part because of complicity and disregard. And much as Corwin acknowledges the need to obliterate him, for him the larger question is what can be done to prevent the next one. It’s safe to say that Corwin, who died at 101 in 2011, would not be happy with today’s world.

Nearly thirty years later, in 1973, German radio producer Peter Leonhardt Braun asked some of same questions in The Bells of Europe.

This seminal work influenced the first wave of contemporary American producers for public radio. Braun told these hatchlings that they were too wedded to script, and needed to learn how to let sound tell the story. He could hardly have provided a better example than Bells.

Let’s approach this as Saunders would. Here the models might be Turgenev’s “The Singers,” in which various characters in a tavern witness a singing competition; the power of the music eventually subsumes the rest of the story; and, less obviously, “The Darling,” about a much married woman (one husband at a time), which Saunders calls “a pattern story”; with each successive matrimony, the character morphs, subtly, into a different person.

In Braun’s work, there is first the story of the bells themselves, and their importance in European history, culture, and religion. Both Catholic and Protestant Europe built imposing churches to the glory of their versions of God, and bells were their voices. The sonorous narrative leads us through this early material, and works to make us understand not only their sound but their materiality.

As previously noted, one of the gifts of Russian greats that Saunders most celebrates is their way of locating complex truths in the stuff of ordinary lives—their towns and farms, and their families, their servants; their animals.

Like On a Note of Triumph, Bells is constructed in acts, and Braun’s narrative moves from history to the role of bells in society. In the second, act, we literally attend a funeral, in which the bells are solemn witnesses. Braun pioneered intimate field recording, and several minutes into this segment we realize that we are at the edge of the grave. In relation to the Russians, Saunders wants us to understand that if we follow only the physical life of the stories, we miss the rich allegories under the surface.

Bells are then honored as vital sentinels during floods, crying out that the barricades have given way. Braun returns us to the barely concealed metaphor—magnificent bells became the weapons of war; melted down to dross. And we are asked to make the leap ourselves—men were also sacrificed as dross.

Braun had an unlikely poetic ally in the mystery novelist Dorothy Sayers. Her detective Lord Peter Wimsey was usually to be found in the upper-class households and clubs that defined a certain strata of English society in the 1920s and 1930s. But in what’s considered her best and most venturesome novel, The Bells (1934) she places Wimsey in a small English village about to be overtaken by a flood. As in Braun’s accounting, the ringing of the bells sounds the alarm, and uncovers a long-buried crime.

Saunders’ interrogation of Tolstoy’s Master and Man is filled with urgent physical life, including, in a stunning denouement, the death of one man on top of another. And his discussion of Turgenev’s The Singers, an ambling story that leads us to a singing competition in an inn, reveals a much quieter social reversal. His observations about these stories connect to Erica Heilman’s beautifully restrained Peabody Award-winning documentary Finn and the Bell.

In Pond, Saunders he explores the way in which great Russian writers turn the constraints of their social world, with its rigid class distinctions and combination of brutality and grandeur, into manifestations of the human condition.  Finn and the Bell is a worthy companion. Heilman lives in a small Vermont community, and has said that she felt pushed to create works that honored that world.

Saunders wants us to understand that if we follow only the physical life of the stories, we miss the rich allegories under the surface.

But she couldn’t have imagined a devastating blow to that world—the inexplicable suicide of a young man—and that great grief would also yield great work, and in part because of the same kind of restraint Tolstoy evidences in Master and Man.

Of course, the restraint was deliberate—this is the author of War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, after all. His emotional arsenal was vast, and yet he deliberately situates this story in the confined space of a Russian village.

Hielbrun does the same. In fact, her approach reminds me not only of the Russian greats as parsed by George Saunders, but of John Donne, who once gave a sermon describing Hell as everything of value you would lose from your life on earth.

In fact, Heilbrun doesn’t tell the story of Finn’s death at all, except for a very brief mention that sets the stage for the story. Instead, she brings him back to life through the love of his family and friends, and the one great gift he gave his town.

Saunders’ Russian stories often have “soft” endings. The drama happens, and then life goes on. After the almost Biblical moral volte-face of “Master and Man” (the self-centered merchant sacrifices his life for his servant), we hear that Nikita lost a few toes and lived a long life; Allegorical “Gooseberries” in which the characters experience sort of compressed midlife crises, ends with the line “The rain beat against the panes all night.”

So it is with Finn and the Bell. “She [Finn’s mother Tara] pulled the bell over and over and over, until…it said what it needed to say.”

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain suggests that Russian literature is “beyond category” a term first used to describe jazz great Duke Ellington. The works are fascinating hybrids, often charting new paths to form and genre. Like the muddled endorsement of Polonius in Hamlet, they are all at once “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited.” Or like Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was called that because it was written in the vernacular, not Latin, and which uses the structure of the Christian voyage of the soul to navigate a mid-life crisis.

So. The Russians can be intimidating. Clearly part of Saunders’ mission, both as a teacher and the author of this book, is to make them easier to understand by putting in the time. Nuanced realism is the usually the coin of the realm, but Saunders was sure to include an example of the absurd, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” in which a barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, wakes up to find in his morning loaf an appendage belonging to a local bureaucrat [Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov] “The Nose” was published in 1836, eighty years before Kafka’s Gregor Samsa woke up as cockroach and has less to do with existential displacement and more to do with the absurdities of bureaucracy and caste. But in both cases, an individual crisis or quest is used as a narrative tool.

It’s a quest story, in which the main character accumulates meaning in a series of encounters, which also reflect on the system he lives in.

Our audio twin? Reply All’s “The Case of the Missing Hit.”

In literature, there is a particular accolade—“a writer’s writer.” It means that something about the writer’s craft inspires the admiration of people who do the same work. The late New Yorker writer Donald Barthleme, an absurdist, is often cited as an example.

And in audio production, “The Case of the Missing Hit,” from the Gimlet’s tech-focused series Reply All is that piece.

I was relieved when I recalled this because I was also searching for a work that would allow me to draw on Saunders’ analysis and appreciation of “The Nose.”

In both cases, the title is the plot: an affronted bureaucrat is missing an appendage—and therefore part of his identity—and the clueless barber is not really up to the task of being the hero of the hour.

“The Case of the Missing Hit,” has a slow build, and there is no attempt to ridicule the central character, the director Tyler Gillette, man who has a earworm of epic proportions. Instead, if the joke is on anyone, it’s Reply All’s producers and hosts, Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt.

The goofy quest is a Reply All trope; the pair once travelled to the Middle East to track down a hacker who tried to take over their personal computers. In “The Case of the Missing Hit,” they are convinced that if they throw the entire arsenal of the professional audio community at the problem of identifying the tune, success will surely be theirs. And along the way, we meet an array of characters.

This is not so much an attempt at finding exact parallels between Saunders literary choices and our audio ones, but of using his methods to find deeper layers of meaning. The objects of quest often get subsumed by the act of questing, and that is definitely one of the things “Hit” wants us to think about.

Saunders’ analysis of his quartet of authors and their stories also puts me in mind of an observation by the late playwright Tom Stoppard. He wrote his trilogy The Coast of Utopia about the lives of 19th-century Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, including Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and as it happens, Turgenev.

It’s a sweeping work, covering more than thirty years in the lives of its characters and their vast country, but some scenes are tiny fragments. They were a tribute not to the large lives he was showcasing, but to the thing he most admired about Russian writers, and that was hardest to imitate: their gift for making vivid, and meaningful, the very small details of life. Making them as relevant and resonant as large emotions states and states.

This is something audio does especially well—our superpower. A single sound, a single voice, can carry into the frame both a surface moment and its poetic overtones.