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I finally finished this book in the summer of 2023, taking Saunders's "Master class" on writing, reading and life, making use of four Russian Master short story writers from the nineteenth century. He's been teaching this class for many years, and he finally decided to make the class public through this book. I read all seven short stories, reviewing them separately and then enjoying Saunders teaching me about the way he sees each story works, each one of them a masterpiece to Saunders.

The stories in the Russian short story master class:

Chekhov's "In the Cart"
Turgenev's "The Singers"
Chekhov's "The Darling"
Tolstoy's "Master and Man"
Gogol's "The Nose"
Chekhov's "Gooseberries"
Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot"

I also found each one of them masterpieces, unforgettable. i reviewed each story on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ separately, then added comments after reading Saunders's essay on each story. He also has some writing exercises at the end, and a reflection on fiction for making your life and the world (slightly) better. He admits that Stalin murdered more than 20 million after the greatest literary period in Russian history in which these writers lived and were lauded by Russian society, so he realizes he can't claim that literature will automatically change the political landscape, or make all people better. Nor did it make Hitler and his boys--murders of millions as well, and lovers of literature and music and art--more humane.

But those of who love reading deeply, those of us who write feelingly and complexly, those of us who teach reading and writing and passionately share books with others, parents and friends and teachers and librarians, know very well that stories can sometimes change lives, even in small ways. It can make you see things from a range of perspectives. It can make you read carefully for "truths" and complexity and and gray areas and lies.

PS: I am doing all this reading and learning about stories in part in conjunction with a project: To collect, edit/revise all of my own short stories (in part with the help of my trusty assistant and fine young writer in her own right, [and daughter] L). I am retyping each story, revising/editing as I/we go. Several of these stories were published, some of them decades ago, so will eventually make them available on a website to be named later. I am also commenting on what I can recall about the construction of each story--including origins, influences--as I recall them. I received an MFA (my advisor was short story master Stu Dybek of Chicago), featuring four of these stories, long ago. My daughter and I are also both writing (parallel) stories this summer based on our trip to the Southland to complete our having visited all fifty US States! The stories touch on our encounters with bears, alligators and sharks, among other potentially scary things.