Reading Notes

The Beggar and Other Stories

by Gaito Gazdanov
translated by Bryan Karetnyk
ISBN: 9781782274018

The Beggar

[

The firm's owner had once had a great many obligations relating to the most varied of people who were connected to him in one way or another.

He had to be at certain places at certain hours, had to respond to some speech, to speak on the evolution of the economy, had to travel hither and thither by train, automobile, ship, aeroplane, stopping in some hotel, had to read some newspaper, had to have an opinion on some composers or artists -- thus appeared the system of his perpetual oppression from which he had long been unable to see any escape. He could, of course, divorce his wife, although in his situation and at his age, and in regard to his children -- a mature son, a young engineer who had already begun to grow bald, and a daughter, a plump-cheeked girl with her mother's cold eyes and a piercing voice - this was seemingly not the appropriate course of action. He could divorce, though this would engender a whole host of new complications. Moreover, divorce would not save him from the other obligations, which would remain just as they were.

]

Living a life that is not your own is a prison of the mind.



[

But if morality did not exist either, then there would be what someone had once foretold, that without the threat of retribution, policing and state authority, people would act according to their nature, leaving on earth only ruins, corpses and pregnant women.

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Morality has a rationale. Morals enable a society to function. We choose to give up selfish motives that may benefit ourselves at great harm to others, because for one we don't want others doing that to ourselves and two the consequential backlash against us would be bad for both parties. In the situation that the victim is powerless to retaliate, we do have aggressors using immoral methods. Their risk is in others with some measure of power and stake in maintaining order in discovering their crime. But to act unilaterally without morals is to sow seeds of your own ruin. Either because you have destroyed all those around you or you have made enemies of the survivors.

This view held by religious moralists that without imposed punishments, people would freely commit crimes against each other ignores that people are rational beings. Morality is not a set of arbitrary rules that makes a more powerful being happy for inexplicable reasons.

[

He knew that not one of them truly loved him, and his was understandable: he himself had never experienced an irresistible attraction to a woman or that feeling of love about which he read in books. Instead of this, there was something akin to physical thirst, tormenting, exhausting, irritating; and when the thirst had been quenched, all that remained was the unpleasant dregs, and nothing else.

]

The biological urge for sex is bothersome when not accompanied by love. Unfulfilling. Leaves you empty. Doesn't go away and keeps coming back. Almost angering for a rational, intelligent being to be controlled by such a crude, primitive impulse.

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To live meant to have desire, to strive for something, to defend something.

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Staying alive for fear of death is pointless. The point of you existing is that you nurture a way of things, or strive for a goal. Living out of fear may be inadvertently doing these things, as in maintaining the status quo for a group of people in power. But that is not you. Someone else is living the life you worked for.

[

Among the great many obligation the most onerous was that of lying to everyone around him and to everyone in general whom he met. Lying meant pretending that he was the same sort of man as they were, that he was prepared to play his role to the bitter end. It was not easy for him to take that decision that nobody ever understood. He did not know how his life would subsequently turn out. But he did know that he could no longer remain in the world he inhabited until then.

]

Living your life you can lie to others but not to yourself. Ultimately all that pretending would be denying himself his life.


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He dreamt that he was walking across a snowy field, through a blizzard, that he felt very cold and that someone's mocking voice was telling him things that, try as he might, he could not understand, while these sounds and words drew nearer and nearer to him and, at the last second, someone demanded that he repeat the words.

]

Gazdanov likes to put dreams into his characters when they are searching for meaning.

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In what he had done, having forsaken his house and become a vagrant, chance, about which he often thought, had played no role whatsoever. "Ruins, corpses and pregnant women." No, not only those. Apart from them there would still be people -- those like him; those who shared none of the common passions, common aspirations that define human life-- that is, those who never dream of becoming a general, a marshal, a bishop, a deputy, a banker, an accountant, a Don Juan, a hero, the bearers of unwanted status, those in whom that pale and dying flame that can be extinguished at any moment barely flickers.

]

Chance made lead you there at a certain time, but where we set our minds is where eventually our way leads us. It's always in our hearts. Through countless small choices and actions, the course straightens itself out over time.

[

A colossal administrative machine had been set in motion, and what no one had suspected until now became known. In one of the evening papers an article was printed in which everything was explained: Verdier's nervous attack, which had been accompanied by a loss of memory, and his sudden disappearance. It was suggested that he had spent many years abroad and had returned to France only after the sudden remembrance of everything that had foregone his mental illness.

Thereafter, Verdier's body was claimed by his heirs. A solemn funeral took place, and Verdier was laid to rest in the family crypt. His name was written in gold letters on a duskily glittering slab of dark-grey marble. The consummation of his life was externally exactly as it ought to be, and this was, ultimately a victory for the world he had renounced a quarter of a century previously. It could be termed a victory for that world -- but only if one were to concede that the meaning of the word "victory" outgrows the boundaries of human life, penetrating where there are no boundaries, no life, no meaning, no words.

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A man who renounced the world and its imposed titles, who lived his life outside societal obligations, finally in the end was reincorporated into its customs with a burial, a tombstone suiting his wealth and former position, and the distribution of his estate to his heirs. So that was a victory for the world he lived apart from. Imposing on him in death what he rejected in life.

The reasons for his actions were revised to fit a conventional narrative and his way of living explained away and dismissed as an illness. His true life tossed aside and the territory claimed by a fictitious life that adheres to societal norms.

The last lines don't really make coherent logic, but I believe the message is society's victory loses meaning from a greater perspective. And the man's personal victory against the world loses meaning too. It's a battle that the universe could care less about.

Deliverance

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He understood that in her life everything had been almost as hopeless as in his -- with the difference that she still wanted to live and attached a value to certain things that provoked only sadness and disgust in him, and that the matter of dressmakers and the maid interested her only because it stopped her pondering what she ought not to ponder, lest she cry or become upset.

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Having lunch in public every day, I'm exposed to polar opposites of conversation. There are people who live in trivial abundance with nothing to talk about. First world problems. They place artificial importance on insignificant things. They are full of pretense and self-importance. They speak to show their influence, rather than to communicate a message.

There are people who labor and strive to survive. They let each other know their families are doing okay. Graduations and marriages and big life moments. They talk about challenges they face and uncertainties in the future. Down to earth concerns. They don't have time for meaningless displays, though they might grimace a smile and say things are okay if there's no point in despair.

The woman in the story seems like personality of the former type, even though she went through hardship. She probably feels living the life of the latter is a terrible tragedy.


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The piece was all too familiar to him and he did not care for it. He began listening and with incredulity and amazement noted that in Toscanini's interpretation it sounded totally different, revealing to him things that he had never before known and that now, listening to the Danse macabre for the hundredth time, he understood and perceived anew.

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Gazdanov's characters follow the same basic pattern. It starts with a life altering event (e.g. a voyage, a car crash, a large wealth) and an illness following the change. Previous problems are either solved or made irrelevant by the big event. The protagonist enters a depression. Past actions and desires lose their meaning. He has a dream he can't quite understand. He struggles to find sense in doing the things he used to do. This leads to a new understanding. He reaches out to people to share in his new perspective but his thoughts are not well received. He feels more alone.

New understanding and finding past things meaningless go hand in hand. You no longer think and act like the people around you. You look around to see if anyone else has woken from the Matrix, and they get wary of your unconforming behavior. It isolates you.