“Lidia Georgievna, let’s be frank. At the beginning of the vacation you gave us a terribly long list of books, not one of them less than five hundred pages. How long does it take to read a book like that? Two months? And it’s always an epic, a trilogy — ‘to be continued’. Who do they publish them for?”
Young technical student Anikin is addressing an issue with his literature teacher in Solzhenistyn’s “For The Good Of The Cause“. He goes on to argue that every technical student must read the latest technical journals and publications just to keep up with advances in technology. How can he have time to read classic novels, especially epics when he is trying to keep up with his practical knowledge for his career? And why do they even bother to publish such lengthy books?
Though the setting of Anikin’s dilemma is in the Soviet Union of 1963, we can easily see that this is an equally applicable question in today’s society, in any country.
Anikin continues with this train of logic:
“To my way of thinking…authors who in this day and age write such long things really have a lot of nerve! We always have to find the most economical solutions when we design a circuit… ‘Couldn’t this be made shorter? Or simpler? Or cheaper?’ … Why don’t they just say: ‘This novel could have been one-tenth as long, and that one isn’t even worth reading.’ “
The comparison between technological design and writing is intriguing. After all, if our technology is geared towards making things smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce, why not apply it to novel writing and literature? With our compressed time for recreation due to having to read endless journals, analysis reports, upgrading our education with the most current courses, who has time to read the full-length 1500-page version of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” when you can simply get the Coles notes, or the “War and Peace For Dummies” outline, or even the Reader’s Digest condensed version? If really pressed for time, you can simply get the gist of it from the Wikipedia entry while you are waiting for your Flash-enhanced technical journal to download in another tab.
Is the epic novel a thing of the past? Is the future of writing to be just simple blog entries, short stories, and tracts? Or is there still a place for the epic novels? The answer to both is “yes”.
While it is easy to point to novel’s such as Tolstoy’s epics “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”; Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”; Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”; and Fadeyev’s “The Young Guard” as examples of “classic” Russian/Soviet literature, it must be noted that these are but a few of the works of each of these authors. Though he wrote 3 lengthy novels, Tolstoy also wrote a prolific amount of short stories and shorter novels, as did the other authors named above.
To move into another sphere, “Njal’s Saga” is considered the grandest of the Icelandic sagas, but certainly there were many other short sagas that are also a part of classic Icelandic folklore and literature.
Perhaps in this novella “For The Good of the Cause” the author was questioning whether or not to write two lengthy novels that he had been working on. In fact, the next work that Solzhenitsyn published was his epic story “Cancer Ward”, followed a few years later by his even-longer multi-volume “Gulag Archipelago”.
In the science fiction genre, Arthur C. Clarke wrote the Space Odyssey series, and co-wrote the 4-book “Rama” series.
In the 1980’s Jean Auel published her “Clan of the Cave Bear” – though only 468 pages in length, it is still a long read. This has evolved into 7-book series called “Earth’s Children” of which the sixth is in progress.
Then came the “Harry Potter” series, and more recently the “Twilight” series of novels. No one complained about the length of the books in these series. People found time to read them, sometimes reading an entire 700-page book in a day!
Short stories, novellas, novels, epics; each has their place in the realm of classic literature. There is a great admiration for the writer who can develop and successfully achieve an effective story in a few short pages. Still more the writer who can take and develop a consistency of style, story, and character development growth over the course of an epic, even over a trilogy and beyond.
Circuits, computer programs, technology are all worked at to be smaller, faster, cheaper. Condense “War and Peace” to make it shorter, faster to read, and cheaper to produce by not having so many pages, and you take away fine details from the art, leaving a pale facsimile of the author’s intent.
Classic literature is not a technology that should be made to fit into a science lab or an accountant’s balance sheet as such. Classic literature is an art; a form of communicating thoughts and ideas and events; a means of expression. Let us not lose the art of story-telling.
