This year I am reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s early novels and stories. One of my favorites is A Country Doctor’s Notebook, a charming, posthumously-published collection of autobiographical short stories chronicling his 18 months as a country doctor.
Unlike his satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, this quiet little book introduces Bulgakov’s serious side. The protagonist, a young, sardonic doctor, has a wry sense of humor, but is racked with self-doubt and loneliness. After qualifying as a doctor in Kiev in 1916, he was drafted to a remote country practice and the sole doctor of a 40-bed hospital.
Bulgakov deftly captures the country doctor’s loneliness and isolation. He misses Kiev: in this tiny hamlet, there are no shops, theaters, street lights, or electricity. The weather is glum, cold, and generally terrible.And he is awakened in the middle of the night during a blizzard to drive miles in a horse-drawn buggy to treat a patient.
Although his knowledge of medicine is textbook-perfect, the 25-year-old doctor is hampered by inexperience. Once he dashes back to his room to consult a reference book, and then recovers his near-photographic memory of a technique used during a difficult delivery. When a farmer brings in his beautiful daughter with her legs mangled from falling into a flax brake, he feels he is looking at a living corpse. The midwife whispers, “What’s the point of smashing her up anymore? She’ll die any minute now… you won’t save her.” The doctor, too expects her to die in surgery, but she survives the amputation of both legs. Months later, she walks in on crutches with her father to thank him and give the doctor the gift of an embroidered towel.
Throughout the book, he has many touching, often humorous encounters with country folk. He is astonished when a patient decides to take all of his medicine at one time, thinking it will be more efficient that way. The doctor treats many cases of siphylis, whole families at a time, even children and is grieved when a patient has left it too late to recover. Eventually, he decides to leave the practice to become a venereologist in Kiev. A few years later, Bulgakov gave up medicine to be a writer.
This book is touching, though never sentimental. In some ways I prefer Bulgakov’s gruff, sardonic realism to his satiric brilliance. Of course, my favorite of his books is The White Guard, a kind of miniature War and Peace set during the Russian revolution. It has the perfect balance of gravity and humor.
THE POSSIBLE TBR: TEN BOOKS I MIGHT READ IN 2024
I was given a planner for Christmas, so I must plan. Here are ten books I might read in 2024.
1. Little, Big, by John Crowley. I am a fan of Crowley’s Aegypt trilogy, but have never read his famous novel, Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award. The jacket copy says: “This is the saga of the Drinkwater family, the sparkling inhabitants of Edgewood, and the ever-changing house that sits on the border between what we know is real and what we’ve always hoped is real.”
I rather think I live on that border!
2. Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal. I enjoyed Hrabal’s bizarre short novel, Dancing Lessons for the Advance in Age, which I read on vacation and promptly forgot. Closely Watched Trains is said to be a classic, and the 1966 film is is famous.
3. The Sojourner, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Last year I read The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It is one of those sad animal books, beautifully-written but weepy. The Sojourner sounds fascinating, a historical novel that follows the life of a farmer, Ase, from the 1860s to the beginning of World War II. Throughout his life, he tries to find his adventurous brother, Ben, who left the farm to travel and never returned.
4. Christopher and His Kind, by Christopher Isherwood. The jacket copy says: “He describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggle to save his companion…from the Nazis.” I once wrote a paper on this exquisitely-written memoir.
5. The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains. According to the jacket copy, this is not the story of a man, but of an event. The death of Jacques Godard inspires brief passing memories in the minds of the porter, his fellow lodgers, and others who casually knew him.
6. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. Perhaps I will read a few of stories in this enormous anthology, which I bought years ago. However, I read Ballard’s The Drowned World and Drought last year and was not impressed. In fact, they were abysmally bad.
7. Heaven and Hardpan Farm by Nancy Hale. Library of America has reissued Nancy Hale’s short stories and her novel, The Prodigal Women. I find her work uneven, but this is one of her later novels, and perhaps I’ll give it a try..
8. Women in the Wall by Julia O’Faolain. I have a Virago edition of this historical novel, set in Gaul in the Dark Ages.
9. Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome. By the author of Three Men in a Boat.
10. Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce. Well, this is a classic, isn’t it? I’m not inspired, but it is a very slim volume of stories.
What’s on your TBR this year? Or your MTBR (Maybe TBR)?
Bulgakov became a venereologist himself before he took up writing. It’s been said that like the young doctor he became a cocaine addict.
I haven’t read Ballard for years but if I remember rightly he was effectively learning to write when he produced The Drowned World and Drought, so they are literally prentice works.
Poor Bulgakov! These stories are almost a memoir. Syphilis was endemic in the rural area, hence the idealistic switch to venereology. I didn’t know about the addiction.
Well, I will have to try Ballard’s stories. I’ve heard such good things of him.
I was happy to see your post on A Country Doctor’s Notebook, as my copy just showed up in the mail for me last week. I’m looking forward to reading it. I like autobiographical pieces, and memoirs, so I’m less interested in reading The Master and the Margarita — which so many swear by and which I friend sent me for Christmas. But I will want to read it to at some point. Not that it isn’t autobiographical per se, but just that it has some more satirical or absurdist elements that interest me less than more realist writing.
I can highly recommend Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains. It is an amazing book by one of those writers that makes it look easy. He has a dark humor in his work, which I also found in his two short autobiographical novels — The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and Cutting It Short — both of which will have many familiar characters, places, and themes that you’ll recognize from Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. Cutting It Short is fascinating to me because it is sort of an imaginary remembering of his mother’s life before he was born. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is more about his own childhood, and his stepfather, I believe, who ran the brewery in their town.
Another book and author that I might recommend is Jospeh Roth. His book The Radetzky March is one of the most beautiful and well-written books I’ve read in the last few years. Some of his other work is uneven, but this one is his masterpiece. Michael Hoffman has done wonderful translations of many of his books, but I found the Joachim Neugroschel translation of The Radetzky March to have a better flow and feel to it.
I always enjoy your blog posts, and your writing about your cats was a gentle balm for my sadness as I watch my older dog show signs of aging. I hope that his current needs for lots of sleep are a happy and comfortable time for him, in his later years, as it was for your cat. He just seems sad that he doesn’t have the energy to do all that he normally loves to do. I’m hoping his new arthritis medicine might help.
Enjoy A Country Doctor’s Notebook!
I only realized recently that the movie Closely Watched Trains was based on a book by Hrabel. Some culture seeps into the mind, the rest is bric-a-brac.
I have heard so much good about Joseph Roth. Maybe it’s time to catch up on 20th-century European lit.
And thanks for the compliment on my blog. I do feel sad for your dog: they are such human characters!
I saw Imgard Keun on your winter reading glories, and I think I recall your post about reading it. I loved the Artificial Silk Girl but haven’t read After Midnight yet.
She and Roth were in a relationship at some point, and it is said that the character of the traveling journalist (I don’t recall if it is her husband or partner or friend) in her Child of All Nations is based on Roth. He died fairly young in 1939, of alcoholism and poor health.
I love Irmgard Keun and hope you enjoy After Midnight. Haven’t read Child of All Nations, but it’s on my list. It’s always fascinating when two writers “hook up.” Keun was bold: she had to leave germany and then snuck back during the war. I s must read Joseph Roth!