The Forged Coupon, like Resurrection, is a story tracing the consequences of an evil action. Its moral message is close to the heart of Christianity (whether Tolstoy’s version or any other): our actions are infectious, for good as well as for evil, and we are all responsible for one another. Resurrection pursues this theme in a single story line developed at great length. The Forged Coupon, in a much smaller space, attempts something more ambitious: to follow the ramifications of a simple act of dishonesty as they affect the lives of more and more characters in a variety of places and at many social levels. The Forged Coupon pushes at the limits of the reader’s capacity to remember multiple groups of characters, but in doing so it achieves a remarkably wide panoramic view of Russian society from convict to Tsar, and something like a God’s-eye view of human behaviour.
In Part One, Chapter VIII the narrator hints at ‘something far more serious than anything merely human eyes could perceive’ having happened: Tolstoy, the master of detailed observation and psychological analysis, is now pursuing God-like omniscience into the moral sphere. This involves a strong conviction not only of the power of darkness, but of the power of light. The central point of the story is the brutal murder of the saintly Mariya Semyonovna, and Part One ends with her killer Stepan, overcome with weariness and vodka, collapsing in a ditch where he lies until two days later. It is on the third day that he rises again, not yet to a redeemed life, but to the Tolstoyan equivalent of purgatory. Mariya Semyonovna’s death haunts her killer and ultimately brings about Stepan’s moral regeneration, and the salvation of others with whom he comes into contact, so that he comes nearest to being the hero of the story – if it had one. Despite the contrived nature of its structure, The Forged Coupon, like almost everything Tolstoy wrote, retains his extraordinary ability to make us feel that this is all part of real life, and as in many of his fictions the ‘open’, indeterminate ending seems a confirmation of this: life continues, the truth marches on, and despite the suffering and squalor there is hope.
Tolstoy coined his own term, oproshchéniye (from prostói – simple), to denote the process of simplifying down to embrace a way of life closer to that of the peasantry and the soil, and there are characters in The Forged Coupon who exemplify this process in action. The technique of the story, however, remains complex and sophisticated, even though its language is low-key throughout and in places approaches the speech of the common people. Alyosha Gorshok (1905) takes this linguistic process of simplifying down much further, and narrates the life (and since this is Tolstoy, the death) of a peasant character in the sort of language which he himself would have used – had he been articulate enough to tell his own story, which he certainly is not. Alyosha Gorshok is, for Tolstoy, an extreme example of laconicism, which has been justly compared to Chekhov. There are only two named characters in the story – Alyosha (or Alyoshka when he is very young, and when people are talking down to him) and the cook Ustinya, and all the material details are the humdrum details of daily life which would be much the same anywhere for the lower classes in Russia. Thus Alyosha becomes a semi-anonymous representative figure, and also a late example of the well-known Holy Fool, who smiles, obeys orders and ‘dies well’. Yet the cryptic nature of the story gives no real clue to whether Tolstoy sees Alyosha as a hero, or merely as a victim, and the final impression is one of tragic waste, together with a mute, smouldering anger at the social system of which Alyosha is a victim. Despite everything, however, the economy of means and the implied sympathy produce a result which is both beautiful and moving. Would Turgenev have approved?
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I should like to express my sincere gratitude to the following people for their help in the translation of these and the two preceding stories: to Gillian Squire of the London University School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, for her assistance in tracing texts; and to Ignat Avsey, Leonid Feygin, Prince Andrei Golitsyn, Dmitry Usenko, Susan Wilkins and Helen Wozniak, for their invaluable advice on matters of fact and language.
N. J. Cooper
April 2000
AFTER THE BALL
‘WHAT you are saying is, that a man is incapable of deciding for himself what is good and what is bad, that everything depends on the environment, that man is the victim of his environment. But as I see it, everything really depends on chance. Listen, I will tell you about something that happened to me personally …’
