SUDDENLY!

“Suddenly” is a word used often by the Russians.  I remember being told once in a writing workshop never to use the word “suddenly.” Only Dostoevsky can use that word, the teacher said.

Writing instructors often say that nothing in fiction happens without a stated or hinted reason. Dostoyevsky uses the word “suddenly” seven times in the first five pages of his short story the “White Nights.” In Russian history it is often the foreign ray, or light, or idea, or perspective that drives Russia, sometimes driving it crazy.

But, we generally know that human events do not usually happen suddenly. Like earthquakes, we feel them in a moment, but underneath the causal elements were long before inexorably moving toward the explosion. We, on the surface of things, measuring only what our senses tell us or what we want to believe, feel only the culminating shock. Read more »

Like a Russian River

Russian history,
it seems to me,
is much like a Russian river.

It lays unhappily frozen,
obedient within its constraining banks
for a period longer than it can stand.

Then suddenly,
some foreign ray of change
permeates the ice
and the river erupts,
climbing upon itself
moving recklessly down stream
releasing its discontent,
taking everything with it,
the good and the bad,
until it finds its kind of peace
and flows quietly
with all appearances of normality.

But winter will come again
and how soon
no one knows
for sure.

Frederick R. Andresen
2000
Photo by Christopher Harrington

Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”