Pseudopod 288: The White Dog

[Bdoomed]

Pseudopod 288: The White Dog

By Fyodor Sologub.
Probably published before 1896, this story appeared in in English translation in 1915 and was published in WEIRD TALES magazine in 1926.

Fyodor Sologub was a Russian poet, novelist, translator, and playwright, a pessimist with a morbid sense of humour (characteristic elements of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy), and a significant figure of the Symbolist movement. Sologub became in Russia one of the four best-known writers in his time with Andreyev, Kuprin, and Gorky. His reputation as an “archetypal decadent” stemmed from his early prose works, which are characterized by the blending of reality and fantasies, quietly demonic spirit, world-weariness, and existential despair. “It’s life that’s the dream / I relinquish the old lies / And the torturing of time.” Sologub’s child characters are often haunted by abnormal psychic experiences and a longing for death. He died in Leningrad on December 5, 1927. He was said never to have been seen laughing during the whole of his life.


Your reader this week is Tanja Milojevic, who is originally from Serbia but has been in the US since the age of 5. She has been voice acting since her senior year of high school and can be heard all over (including Darker Projects, Broken Sea Audio Productions, 19 Nocturne Boulevard, Edict Zero, Pendant and Dunesteef). She produces her own radio dramas and posts them to her podcast LightningBolt Theater of the mind (click the link - we dare you). She says “I’m visually impaired and have ROP and Glaucoma, but use gold wave which is very accessible with the jaws screen reader to mix and record my work.”

“In a barely audible voice the old woman mumbled: ‘Yes, I am a crow. Only I have no wings. But there are times when I caw, and I caw, and tell of woe. And I am given to forebodings, my dear; each time I have one I simply must caw. People are not particularly anxious to hear me. And when I see a doomed person I have such a strong desire to caw.’”


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THE HORROR IN CLAY



Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

[Unblinking]

I don't get it.  I mean, I thought I understood the basic series of events, but I'm not really sure what they're supposed to group into as a whole.  Maybe something lost in translation?  Or maybe I'm just dense?  It seemed very strange that the guy at the end kept saying "wow, it's remarkable how that wolf looks so much like a woman and not particularly like a wolf" but never seemed to consider the idea that if it looks more like a woman than a wolf that it might be a woman.

[Jeff C. Carter]

Yeah, was she a werewolf or was it mistaken identity?  Did the hunters collapse in horror because they saw that they had shot a woman?

The author is noted to have been a poet and Symbolist, and I suspect these crow/wolf characters were mentally ill, or more likely just symbols for ostracized and unhappy people in Russian society.  I enjoyed the language and the narrator was very easy on the ears.

[Balu]

Really outstanding narration. So much so, that I listened to the entire story even though I didn't get it.

I have a feeling it was meant to be 'got', too, as everything probably stood for something else that was going on in Russia in 1915.

I bet you were supposed to read this and think "Damn those anarcho-syndicalists apoligists for the bourgeois tsarists!"

[Scattercat]

I didn't feel like this was a particularly allegorical story.  It seemed much more to hinge on that moment of liminality, the transition point between dog and woman.  That creepy halfway non-place that might be a matter of perspective or might be hideously accurate.

I read this story many, many years ago, and it has stuck with me all that time.  The description of woman-as-dog is just so awfully almost.

[ThomasTheAttoney]

This was like two poor stories.  One of poorly motivated harassment and one of "hey look, its a werewolf"  let me describe it over and over again.  Oh yes, the long and pointless physical description of her hair as a human were similar to her hair as a wolf.  So what?  Is this contempt for the listener that everything has to be described to them?  Like the description of how it felt to walk on the floor with bare feet.  That did little to nothing to advance the story.  Overall, ok as a story for children around a campfire.  Not a story for sophisticated adults.

[Bdoomed]

the description of how it felt to walk on the floor with bare feet.  That did little to nothing to advance the story.

Do descriptions have to advance storyline?

[Unblinking]

This was like two poor stories.  One of poorly motivated harassment and one of "hey look, its a werewolf"  let me describe it over and over again.  Oh yes, the long and pointless physical description of her hair as a human were similar to her hair as a wolf.  So what?  Is this contempt for the listener that everything has to be described to them?  Like the description of how it felt to walk on the floor with bare feet.  That did little to nothing to advance the story.  Overall, ok as a story for children around a campfire.  Not a story for sophisticated adults.

Hey, who are you calling sophisticated?

[ThomasTheAttoney]

For a short story, yes, descriptions do have to advance the story.  For a long novel, one can have extraneous things to make absolutely sure the reader gets the mood or immersion.  A short story, as defined first by Edgar Allen Poe, often recognized as one of the first short story writer wrote that anything that does advance a short story should be removed.  Hundred year old advice to be followed.

Unblinking "sophisticated?" hah, good one.

[Unblinking]

For a short story, yes, descriptions do have to advance the story.  For a long novel, one can have extraneous things to make absolutely sure the reader gets the mood or immersion.  A short story, as defined first by Edgar Allen Poe, often recognized as one of the first short story writer wrote that anything that does advance a short story should be removed.  Hundred year old advice to be followed.

Have you read The Fall of the House of Usher?  Poe was no stranger to large amounts of description.  Not as extreme as Lovecraft by any stretch, but still...

And there's no short-story rulebook that authors are told they must adhere to.  Whatever people want to read is what gets published.  I can claim that a short story needs to do this and a short story needs to do that, but if there are editors buying otherwise and readers buying otherwise, my claims just aren't true.  I can say what I think makes a better short story, and no one can dispute that because they are my opinions.  But I'd be skeptical of any claim of what a short story needs to be (other than the length cuz, you know, shortness being part of the name, despite being a relative measure).

(Note that I didn't really care for this story, either, but I just wanted to point out that there can be endless dispute about what a short story needs to be or to do without ever reaching a resolution)

[Scattercat]

"Advancing the story" means many things.  You have identified one meaning, i.e. moving the plot forward, and you are correct as far as that goes.  However, a sense of immersion, enhancing characterization, and emphasizing themes/motifs are also ways to advance the story, depending on which story is being examined.  Different stories have different goals, and thus use different means to pursue those goals.  As Unblinking pointed out, Poe is not most persons' go-to example of a trim and spare rhetorical style, nor for plot-oriented action-packed narratives, for that matter.

This story, as you may have noticed, contains very little action.  If everything in the story were written purely to advance the action, it would be quite a short story indeed.  However, this story does not have, as its overriding goal, the explication of a plot (in the sense of a series of events).  Instead, this story's primary goal is (it seems to me) to create a particular mood or tone and explore that via imagery.  To that end, extra descriptive passages to enhance a sense of place or engender certain emotions are an entirely valid structural decision.

One is, as ever, free to dislike stories such as this one, whether as a genre or as an individual example.  Once again, however, you have mistaken "I don't like this kind of story" for "This story is written wrong."  I would encourage you to recognize this error in the future prior to posting.

[Balu]

This story, as you may have noticed, contains very little action.  If everything in the story were written purely to advance the action, it would be quite a short story indeed.  However, this story does not have, as its overriding goal, the explication of a plot (in the sense of a series of events).  Instead, this story's primary goal is (it seems to me) to create a particular mood or tone and explore that via imagery.  To that end, extra descriptive passages to enhance a sense of place or engender certain emotions are an entirely valid structural decision.

Which is to say, it's boring.

[Scattercat]

Nobody said you had to like it.  Just that it's not an objectively incorrect way to write a story; it's a story structure that is not to your taste.

[Unblinking]

Nobody said you had to like it.  Just that it's not an objectively incorrect way to write a story; it's a story structure that is not to your taste.

Agreed. 

[Kaa]

I'm with Balu on this one (which, considering our chosen names, is rather amusing). I totally didn't "get" it if there was, indeed, anything there to "get." But I enjoyed the narration thoroughly.

I do like that the 'pods are bringing us some older tales and stories from other cultures. I encourage this, even if I occasionally don't get them.