Mary Postgate, by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling at the Wikipedia

Mary Postgate, analysis

Mary Postgate, essay

Audiobook

RUDYARD KIPLING

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His family were very important people, and they were related to politicians and artists of the time, people that belonged to the Establishment.

When he was five, he was taken with his sister to the UK, where they were left with some cruel relatives. There he went to a poor boarding school, where he had to endure its military discipline.

When he was sixteen, he went back to India, where he worked as a journalist because he couldn’t be a soldier as he was short-sighted. But, thanks to his job, he could make himself deeply acquainted with the true Indian life.

While working as a journalist, he wrote his first poems and short stories, and those were widely read. So, when he went to England at the age of 24, he was already a well-known author. His stories were very popular because people liked exotic countries and because his style was lively and brilliant, something he undoubtedly learnt from his job as a journalist.

When he was 27, he married Carolina Balestier, sister of an American publisher, and the couple settled in Vermont. They travelled a lot, but, four years later, they returned to England because Rudyard couldn’t cope with the American lifestyle.

When he was 42, he got the Nobel Prize for literature, and he was the first English writer to get it.

During the WWI, he was pro-war and lost his son in the trenches. Then he worked in an official institution in nationalistic propaganda to support the army in the conflict; he wrote things like “Germans aren’t human beings, they are beasts”. From then on, he began to lose popularity because his topics started to be too fantastic and difficult.

He died in 1936, when he was 71 years old.

He wrote about his childhood and teenager experiences in Stalky & Co. His novel Captain Courageous is very famous for the film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy; it’s also famous Kim, the narrative about an Irish orphan having to earn his living in India. But Kipling is better when he writes short stories, like the Jungle Books. It’s also well-known the film adaptation of The Man that would be King, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. A very interesting collection of stories for children is Just so Stories where he explains fabulously the mysteries and wonders of the nature, as for example, why the elephant has a trunk, or why the cheetah has stains in its skin.

You also have to know the poem If, because a president whose name it’s better not to remember, said he liked it.

If-, by Rudyard Kipling

 

 

MARY POSTGATE

This is the story of Mary Postgate, a very simple-minded servant who is contracted to work for Miss Fowler, a rich old spinster. Some time after starting her job, Miss Fowler has to adopt a nephew because his parents had died, but Mary Postgate is who takes care of him, protects him, defends him and indulges him. However, this nephew, Wyndham (Wynn), treats her very badly, although she doesn’t seem to notice, or she doesn't hate him for it. Then the WWI breaks out, and Wynn enlists as a pilot. He dies in a training flight, but Mary never shows her sorrow, she only wants to do practical things. Miss Fowler asks Mary to burn almost all his possessions. And then, when she is making things ready for the fire, there is a shocking incident: a barn has collapsed and has killed a girl. People think about a bomb dropped from a German plane, but the doctor says the barn was already decaying and that it collapsed by itself. Short after this, when Mary lights the fire, he sees an aviator badly injured in a tree nearby.  Is he German, French or English? Has he dropped a bomb? Is he going to die? Is Mary going to help him or call the police?

 

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

Mary Postgate

Miss Fowler

Wyndham (Wynn) Fowler

What do you know about the WWI?

What are Taubers, Farmans and Zeppelins?

Why does Miss Fowler ask Mary, “What do you ever think of, Mary?”, and on what occasion?

What is Contrexéville?

Explain Wynn’s accident and the women’s reaction to it.

Miss Fowler said, “Old people and young people slip from under a stroke like this [her nephew’s death]. The middle-aged feel it most”. What is your opinion?

Why did Mrs Grant say, “he’ll be practically a stranger to them”?

What do you do with the things of a dead person, a relative?

What nationality was the agonizing pilot in the tree? How do you know?

What would Wynn have done with the injured pilot?

Did this aviator kill Edna with a bomb? How do you know?

How did this pilot die?

Was it justice or revenge?

Was any love between Mary and Wynn? Why do you think so?

What is the meaning of these questions: “Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?”?

Why is Mary “quite handsome” at the end?

 

 

VOCABULARY

unflinchingly, slander, odd, cliques, unitemised, shamble, butt, gazetted, bouts, cassowary, bathchair, stinking, tow, buttoned up, fended her off, wailed, gaudy, barrow, goloshes, assegai, O. T. C., pewter, unearthed, fret-saw, condemned, paviour, char

Gimpel the Fool, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer at the Wikipedia

Gimpel the Fool at the Wikipedia

Sumary

Analysis

Audiobook

Adaptation for theatre

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, by Aurora Ledesma

Biography

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired Jewish writers of the Twentieth Century, as well as an important figure of Literature written in Yiddish, the language in which his books were published throughout his career. His writings describe Jewish life in Poland and the United States.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 11^th of November 1903 in Leoncin, Poland, and died the 24^th of July 1991 in Surfside, Florida. He was the fifth of six children, of whom only four survived. His father was a rabbi, and his mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Biigoraj. His sister Hinde Esther and his brother Israel Joshua, became writers as well and played prominent roles in his life and served as models for a number of his fictional characters. His younger brother, Moishe and his mother both died in the Holocaust.

His family moved to Warsaw, Poland, when he was four years old. Singer was also educated in a strict spiritual practice. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. But singer preferred being a writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made his debut with the story In Old Age which he published in Warsaw. His first novel, Satan in Goray, was published in Poland before he migrated to the U.S.A in 1935.

He was married in Poland and had a son, but, when he moved to New York, he left them and, then, in 1938, he met Alma Wassermann, a German Jewish refugee, and married her.

He settled in New York, as his brother had done a year before, and worked for the Yiddish Newspaper Forvets and he also translated many books into Yiddish from Hebrew and Polish, and some books by Thomas Man from German.

Although Singer’s works were now available in their English versions, he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish until his death.

Singer has popular collections of short stories translated into English, one of the most popular around the world is Gimpel the Fool. His short stories are saturated with Jewish folklore, legends and mysticism.

Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story, which have been adapted into films. The most famous story adapted to a film is Yentl with Barbra Streisand.

He also wrote My Father’s Court, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Warsaw.

 

THE STORY: GIMPEL THE FOOL

Gimpel, who has had the reputation of being a fool since his school days, is the narrator of his own story. Gimpel is an orphan who was being raised by his sickly grandfather. He lives in a town called Frampol and works as a baker. He believes everything he is told, trusting that even strange and crazy things are always possible. His neighbours convince him to marry Elka, a local prostitute, whom he believes to be a virgin, even though she already has one child and is pregnant when they marry. When Elka gives birth only four months after their marriage, she convinces Gimpel that the boy was born prematurely. Gimpel grows to love the baby and cares for Elka. One day, he discovers Elka with another man in their bed. Gimpel goes to the town rabbi to seek advice, and the rabbi tells him that he must divorce Elka and stay away from her and her two bastard children. Gimpel starts to miss Elka and the baby, and he retracts his declarations to the rabbi, believing Elka when she tells him he was simply hallucinating. Years later, Elka gets very sick, and, before dying, she confesses the truth to him: none of the ten children she had are his.

One day, a short time later, a demon visits him in a dream and persuades him to get revenge on his neighbours by putting urine in the bread dough and selling it in the bakery. However, before the bread can be sold, Gimpel buries all of it underground. Then he packs his things and leaves the town of Frampol forever. He continues travelling around the world as a beggar and storyteller for the rest of his life, determined to believe that everything is possible. At the end of the story, Gimpel says that, when he dies, he will do it so joyfully, as death and the afterlife cannot deceive anyone. 

 

QUESTIONS

Did you use to give nicknames to your schoolmates? Can you tell us about one that was original and caught?

What do you know about the Golem?

Do you think that the jokes that Gimpel’s mates played on him would be called “bullying” now?

What do you think about practical jokes played on the beginners?

What do you know about The Wisdom of the Fathers?

What is your opinion about this sentence: “Better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil”?

Is it a good idea matchmaking? And what about webs or applications to meet people?

“When you’re married, the husband’s the master”. Is this machismo, or we cannot use this term for a different society or for a different time?

“You cannot pass through the life unscathed”: what is the meaning of this philosophy?

What is “bear-baiting”?

What is the meaning of this sentence in context: “No bread can ever be baked from this dough”? Can you give some examples?

How they justify that Elka delivered a boy four months after the wedding?

Did Gimpel love people, or was he only a fool?

What’s the meaning of “Shoulders are from God, but burdens too”?

The story is situated in Frampol. Where is it? And Lublin?

“He found an obscure reference in Maimonides that favoured him”. What is for you the value of tradition or classical books for science?

 

VOCABULARY

hee-hawed, lying in, all the way to (Cracow), made tracks, pranksters, yeshiva, candle-dipper, cat music, took me in (take in), fined, hand-me-down, sexton, hallah, revels, burrs, Tishe b’Av fast day, kneading trough, galore, rooked, beat it, welkin, colicky, bear down, serve, louts, loudmouths, going over, take stock in, dybbuks, leeches, cupping, bill of goods, spin yarns, outlandish, hovel, shnorrer

A Lecture Tour, by Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun at the Wikipedia

A Lecture Tour: analysis

Knut Hamsun, by Dora Sarrión 

Biography

 
Knut Hamsun was born as Knut Pedersen in Lom, in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway, in 1859. He was the fourth of seven children. His family were very poor, so, when he was three, they moved to Hamarøy in Nordland County, to farm a land of an uncle.
At the age of nine, he was sent to live with his uncle Hans Olsen, who used to beat and starve him. Later, Hamsun stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him.
In 1874, he escaped from his miserable life, back to Lom; for the next five years he did any job for money: he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, sheriff's assistant, and an elementary-school teacher.
At 17, he became a ropemaker's apprentice; and, although he had almost no formal education, he started to write. He asked the businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him monetary support, and Zahl agreed. Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan (1894), Dreamers (1904), Benoni (1908) and Rosa (1908).
He left Norway for the United States twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. There, he travelled and worked in various jobs, falling in every project he began. His bitter experience in the American territory led him to write in 1889 a book full of negative comments about the life in that country, From the Spiritual Life of Modern America.
Although this was his first writing, it wouldn’t be released until his next novel, Hunger, was published in 1890. This semi-autobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in Kristiania (now Oslo), the Norwegian capital.
Hunger introduced the typical structure of Knut Hamsun stories: a nomadic protagonist who does not fit in with the people around him, who seeks to return to his origin, drawing inspiration from his own experiences.
Following the success of this novel, there were many other interesting works: Mysteries (1892), Victoria (1898), Under the Autumn Star (1906), A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909) and Wayfarer (1929).
Hamsun achieved his greatest popularity in 1917 with his publication The Blessing of the Earth. Thanks to this work, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1920.
In 1898, he married Bergljot Göpfert, with whom he had a daughter, but the marriage ended in 1906. Three years later, he married Marie Andersen, who was 23 years younger than him. They had four children.
Hamsun had strong anti-English views, and openly supported Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Due to his professed support to the German occupation of Norway, he was charged with treason after the war. In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. 
During the more than 70 years in which he was writing, he published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays, and some of his works have been the basis of 25 films and television miniseries adaptations.
Hamsun is considered to be “one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years” and “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun”. He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue.
 
A Lecture Tour
 
The story, written in first person, is about a professor of Literature who was short of money and decided to go to Drammen, to give a lecture about the novelist Alexander Kielland, one of the most famous Norwegian writers of the 19th century, to earn some extra money.
After reaching Drammen and looking for a hotel, he visited an editor and a lawyer. Both of them put him on the alert that there wasn’t much interest in literature in the city, and he probably would lose money on his business. Furthermore, the same day that he scheduled to give his lecture, an anti-spiritualist was doing his show with apes and wild animals, and it would attract a crowd.
Despite these warnings, he rented one of the pavilions, he paid for an insertion in the newspaper giving the date, place and topic of his lecture, and hired a man to hang cards with publicity around the city, advertising the event.
By chance, both the narrator and the anti-spiritualist stayed in the same hostel.
Each of them talked about what their show was like, and the anti-spiritualist asked him to work on his show because he needed a man to introduce the animals. The narrator didn’t accept it because he thought the anti-spiritualist “was afraid of the competition and was worried that he would steal his audience away from him”.
The day of the show, only the lawyer came to the lecture on literature because almost everybody was watching the show with apes and wild beasts.
When the narrator got tired of waiting for his spectators, he returned to his hostel ashamed and disappointed and aware that he didn’t have any money for the train going back home.
In the middle of that night, the anti-spiritualist, after his show was finished, came into the narrator's room and inquired him about how his lecture had gone. With a bit of embarrassment, he said that he had cancelled it. After that, the anti-spiritualist gave him details about how many problems he had with his presenter that evening and offered him once again the occupation as a presenter of the beasts.
One more time, the narrator found this offer offensive. “Never would I be a party to such vulgarity!!! A man had his honour to consider”, he thought.
The following day, the anti-spiritualist offered him some money if he looked over the speech about the beasts, correcting the grammar and brushing up the language.
It was impossible for the narrator to refuse this offer because “he was doing the man a favour really, and it was, after all, a service in the cause of literature”, and, the most important, he needed the money.
Not only he remade the speech from the beginning to the end, but also accepted to do the speech during the show.
Although the show ended up being a success and the anti-spiritualist was pleased and thanked him warmly for his support, he refused to pay him unless he accepted to appear in his show the next evening. But the narrator decided not to continue with this business and return to his city.
In our story, the protagonist believes that literature itself can bring great benefit to people's souls, and that it doesn’t matter what their real needs are. But the harsh reality shows him that his work can only be successful if it’s adapted to the tastes of the people who are going to receive it.
The citizens of Drammen work hardly during all day, and, in their free time, they only desire to entertain themselves with any activity that will help them forget about their daily routine. They don’t want to be educated.
The protagonist failed his initial approach on his literary tour and was wildly successful when he adapted to the crowd, but I'm not sure if he learned anything from this experience.
I wonder what the real usefulness of literature in our current world is, and if different types of literature are necessary, depending on the social or cultural class of the person.

QUESTIONS

Who was Alexander Kielland?

What’s the present name of Kristiania?

How did the porter guess that our protagonist was a poor man?

What other lecture was taking place at that moment in Drammen?

How can they warm the blankets?

What did our protagonist do to leave the posh hotel?

Where did he want to give his lecture?

What did the anti-spiritualist offer him at first? And what was his answer?

The literary lecture: how did it work? Why?

Why, according to the anti-spiritualist lecturer, cannot a local man present the beasts in the lecture?

Why did our protagonist accept to give the lecture about animals at the end?

This lecture was a serious exposition or only quackery? How do you know?

Was the lecture a success or a failure? How is it described in the text?

What happened with the hyena?

“That’s the power literature has to move men’s minds”. Do you think literature, or a book, or some books can change your life (remember Werther)?

How do you feel when you read something worth of reading, and you know its author is a Nazi?

 

VOCABULARY

took stock, befitting, catered, outgoings, carpetbag, touting, venue, furrier, outlay, swarming, foreboding, posh, butt, dozed off, breeding, scoffed, pelting, standing-room, badgers, marten, Jack of Clubs, mangle, houses, undertaking

The Fall of the Idol, by Richmal Crompton

 

Richmal Crompton at the Wikipedia

Audiobook

Videos

RICHMAL CROMPTON, by Josep Guiteres

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1890, and died in 1969. She was an English writer, specialized in children’s books and horror stories.

She was the second child of Edward John Sewell, a protestant pastor and parochial school teacher, and his wife Clara; her older brother John Battersby was also a writer under the pseudonym John Lambourne.

Richmal Crompton attended St Elphin’s school and won a scholarship to classical studies at Royal Holloway College London, where she graduated Bachelor of Arts, and, in 1914, returned to teach classical authors at St. Elphin’s until 1917. Then, when she was 27 years old, went to Bromley High School in South London, teaching the same subject until 1923. Having contracted polio, she lost the use of her right leg. In 1923 and from then on, she spent her free time to write.

In 1924, she created her famous character William Brown, the protagonist of thirty-eight books of children’s stories in the naughty William saga that she wrote until her death.

She is also the author of a collection of stories about ghosts, the horror novel Dread Dwelling, in 1926, and Bruma, in 1928. As a writer of horror stories, she is eminent.

She never married and had no children; she was an aunt and a great-aunt.

 

THE FALL OF THE IDOL

The Fall of the Idol corresponds to chapter 4 of Just William with her famous eleven-years-old character William Brown.

In this chapter the writer tells us the adventures of William narrating his falling in love with his teacher, Miss Drew.

William, as a good student, sat in the back row. Being in love, he changed his seat to one in the front row. While the teacher explains the lesson, William has his fantasies with the teacher, but she constantly asks him questions about what she explains, and so he is forced to study.

Every day the teacher arrived at class, she used to find some small detail on the table of some admirer, but that morning the table and the chair were full of greenhouse flowers, evidently left by the lover. When William got home, he found his sister and two policemen who were looking for the flower thief.

The next day, Miss Drew was talking to another teacher. William, who was nearby, understood that Miss Drew liked lilacs; so, William got lilacs by stealing them from the window of a house with the subsequent uproar of the owner.

When Miss Drew entered the classroom, she said: “William, I hate lilacs”. Disappointed, his love vanished, and, as a good student, he sat again in the background.

My opinion: I liked this story because it is simple, short, entertaining and written with the fabulous typical English humour.

QUESTIONS 

Talk about your school days: were they happy or boring?

What is your opinion of this saying: “Teach anything at school and, funny it may be, at once it becomes boring”? (Remember the example of sexual education in the film by Monty Phyton “The Meaning of Life”.)

William caught a lizard and kept it in his pocket during the class. Do you have an anecdote to explain about your school days?

What happened to William’s lizard?

Who is the “malicious blind god”?

William starts giving presents to his teacher. What is your opinion about giving presents to your teacher… or to anybody?

What things you don’t do by halves? Do you always finish the book you are reading or the film you are watching?

Could William be married by the Pope? Why?

What do you think of helping your children with their homework?

“He hugged his chains”: what does it mean? Can you give more examples?

What do you imagine William wanted to do with the pipe in the garden?

Can you describe a “guelder rose” and a syringe”?

Explain the adventure of the syringe.

What is the meaning of “the idol has feet of clay”?

What do you think William felt like at the end: angry, happy, or disappointed?

 

VOCABULARY

figures, mug, 3 ½ d, mouth organ, putty, obliging, blood-curdling, outshine, hothouse, riot, soulfully, nonplussed, hubbub, conservatory, week’s mending, babbling, leading article, beaming, ole, ornery, rent, jarred, literal

My First Fee, by Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel at the Wikipedia

Reading Isaac Babel

Life and stories

ISAAC Babel, by Glòria Torner

Isaac Babel is the first major Russian Jewish writer of the first part of 20^th century. He was a master of the short story, and also a playwright, a journalist and did reports and film scripts. His fame is based on his stories about the Jews in Odessa.

The author has two leitmotivs in his life:

If the world could write by itself, it would be like Tolstoy.”

“I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy.”

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine, in 1894.

Babel’s childhood was relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905. However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa.

In his teens, Babel wanted to get into the preparatory class at the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School, but he couldn’t. As a result, he was schooled at home by private tutors. Between 1905 and 1911, he studied the Talmud, violin, German, French, besides of Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish.

He began writing short stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were written in French. He entered the Kyiv Institute of Finances and Business Studies, and he graduated in 1915.  

In 1916, he moved to St. Petersburg where he met Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, who published some of Babel’s stories in his literary magazine Letopis. In 1917, he worked for a short time as a translator for the Cheka and as a reporter for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizin.

During the Russian Civil War, he returned to Odessa where he was an editor for a small publishing house, and, after the Civil War, he became a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient, a Russian newspaper published in Tbilisi. He married Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein in 1919; their union produced a daughter, but his marriage was broken by the husband’s infidelities.

In 1923, he published The Tales of Odessa, a collection of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto. The stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters before and after the October Revolution.  He moved to Moscow and, in 1926, he published The Red Cavalry, thirty-four short stories about the brutal realities of war with horrific violence. During these years, a number of Babel’s family emigrated to Paris, including his mother, sister and, finally, his wife. In 1928, he wrote his first play, Sunset. His next play, Marya, described political corruption, prosecution of the innocent and black market in the Soviet society. This play was intended to be performed in 1935, but was cancelled and was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All the short stories of Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, filled only two small volumes and were published in 2002.

Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B. in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, a writer’s colony. The secret police confiscated nine folders from the dacha and fifteen from his Moscow’s apartment. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyists and an engagement in anti-Soviet activity, including being recruited into a spy network. He was held in Buturka Prison, and, on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin’s orders for espionage. Babel’s last words were “I’m innocent, I have never been a spy... I’m asking only for one thing, let me finish my work.”

MY FIRST FEE

This story was written in the 1920s, and it’s apparently an expansion of an earlier piece called Answer to an Inquiry. Both are variants of the same story: an adolescent boy tells a forlorn, indecent and wholly imaginary tale about himself to a tender-hearted prostitute. It went unpublished during Babel’s lifetime for sexual prudery, not appearing in print until the early 60s, when it was published in New York, first in Russian, then in an English translation.

The story begins with a long description in first person. The springtime has arrived in the town, Tiflis (Tbilisi), where the narrator (perhaps an alter ego of the author), a twenty-years-old young man, is living. He is working as a proof-reader for the printing press of the Caucasus Military.

He describes the room that he has rented from a Georgian couple and the sensual atmosphere of their neighbours. But the most important is that the narrator, who feels lonely, decides to look for love, runs out of the house and walks along the Kura River at night. Tortured by lust, he decides to solicit a prostitute, called Vera, whom he is infatuated with.

Now the story goes on, sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between the writer and the prostitute, and also with narrative and descriptive writing. Before Vera sleeps with him, she asks him for the money he has, and the writer gives her ten rubbles. They decide to go to Borzhom, and he has to accompany her as she makes her rounds and spends his money. Later, they go up to Vera’s room. There, in the prostitute’s bed, Vera prepares to get laid with the narrator, and he tells her that he has never been with a woman. Then he invents a tale.

This second story is about a boy living with an older Armenian man called Stepan Ivanovich, in Baku for four years when he was fifteen years old. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him because he gave them bronze promissory notes, and their friends cashed them and left promissory notes unbacked. Then the writer left him and decided to live with a rich church warden. He finishes the story arriving at a convincing ending with the death of his old man and his own arrival in Tbilisi now with twenty rubbles.

Returning to the first story, he spends the rest of the night making love with the thirty years old prostitute Vera, who tutors the young man in the erotic arts. Vera is moved by the other story and come to consider the narrator as a “sister” prostitute rather than a man. In the next morning, Vera insists on returning the narrator’s money. From his perspective, this money is the first fee he has earned for writing a story. Vera is his “first reader.”

At the end of the story, the author explains the relation and the meaning between the story and the title.

 

Themes

There are two stories and two different themes explained together in the story, one inside the other one, as the Russian doll called matryoshka.

1.    Babel walks up through the steps of crafting a plot. The writer who wants to be known telling a frankly sexual fiction for sex to a prostitute, perhaps a fictitious tale about his life.

2.  The loneliness of a man looking for love and sex. He “experienced a love you will never experience.” To be a writer, does one need to look for love?

Conclusion

Sometimes difficult to understand his prose, with long descriptions with sexual allusions just to explain a strange, sharp and unrealistic story. My First Fee it’s a story about how to write a story.

QUESTIONS

Tell us about the characters

The narrator

Vera

Stepan Ivanovich

Fedosya Mavrikevna

Where is Tiflis? What do you know about its country (language, religion, history…)

The narrator feels the spring in his skin. How do you feel the spring? What qualities of spring affect you the most?

What do you know about Tolstoy?

“I was a dreamer and didn’t have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness”. That is, a dreamer cannot be happy: do you agree? Why?

Why did the narrator ask Vera is she was going to Palestine?

What is Borzhom (Borjomi)?

What information do you have about Golovin and the boyars?

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life”. What is your opinion?

What do you think Vera’s preparations to get laid with the narrator were for?

What does the image “like a toad on a stone” suggest?

Where is Kherson? And Baku?

Why does he say he’s a bitch, a whore?

What is the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

murky, part, whisking, shrews, babbling, hanks, sapping, sultriness, burrowing, dauntless, gruelling, raiment, apish, tenner, wilted, hightail, dough, banged, lackluster, potbellied, dogged, throes, drab, took after, promissory note, auctioned, squeezed, taproom, quaked, cavorting, braying