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The men admire her beauty even as she does all the work to make them comfortable, highlighting Ivan’s hypocrisy.
Pero lo que vino después fue uno de los periodos más sangrientos de la Historia, así que es razonable concluir que no importan las cimas que la creación artística y el pensamiento puedan alcanzar, nunca es suficiente para evitar la barbarie. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. So the first heads-up to future readers is not to expect this to be a collection of “best” or “favorite” Russian classic stories, accompanied by a “how-to-read/interpret” commentary. Perhaps that was my life lesson from this masterclass - to let the things take me where I have to go.Instead, it was if we were just having a conversation between peers or between student and teacher, respectful, casual, comfortable, desirous of learning from one another.
The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.
When the two men take shelter with their friend, while eating a delicious meal cooked and served by a beautiful woman, Ivan, the protagonist, tells a story whose moral seems to be this: happiness exists in the world only because poor people are forced to bear the burden of the happy. He's largely considered the modern master of the short story and his prose is at once gorgeous and experimental. Since I haven’t read literary fiction since high school, I can’t speak to their representation for their class or culture, but Saunders does share some of his thoughts on each as well.