Let's start with the service part this time so everyone knows what to expect.

This book by the American literature professor and writer George Saunders contains 540 pages of seven complete stories by Russian writers of the nineteenth century in German translation, a total of around 160 pages: three by Anton Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy and one each by Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol.

These wonderful texts have nothing to do with the current war, even though Gogol came from Ukraine and the other three writers from Russia.

Debates about the exclusion of Russian culture from the public space shouldn't play a role in what Saunders offers here either.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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Because in his 380 pages of commentary, exercise suggestions and chatty thoughts on the art of storytelling, he is primarily concerned with the craftsmanship.

In other words, the questions of what good literature does, how it is structured and its material sorted, how it holds our attention - and to what extent the precise, form-conscious study of it helps us, not only in our ability to read and absorb, but in life itself "Insight" might be called "insight" as a test, once you've taken a deep breath, even if Saunders rarely reaches for the very highest shelf.

Even "self-help" wouldn't be a bad word, as long as you don't think of common advice literature.

Part easy reading, part meditation, this book aims to show why good readers make happier people.

A clothesline that means something

The author, born in 1958, benefits from his twenty years of teaching experience in the creative writing program at the renowned Syracuse University in New York.

In his own writing, too, he repeatedly falls back on the masters of Russian literature.

But how?

For example, by asking himself (and us) what we felt while reading, because what we feel was obviously created at some point through artistic calculation.

Why are we reading at all?

For example, says Saunders, because the authors have carefully considered what they tell us, in what order and at what level of detail.

In other words: how they direct our gaze.

Chekhov, for example, in the short story On the Wagon (1897) arouses deep sympathy for his protagonist, a bored teacher, by granting her a flash-like reminder, almost an epiphany, late in the text.

And no matter how much Marija will cling to the wasteland in her present life, it is precisely the averageness of her fate, with which the author has pity, that brings her closer to us: Saunders admires Chekhov's sensitive portrayal of "how a lonely person thinks".

Something that had been dead for a long time, he says elsewhere, "has just flared up again in her, has come to life".

Only briefly, but still.

We have known since Proust at the latest that the deepest moments are fleeting.

As with gymnastics, we get better with repetition

Tolstoy's long story Master and Servant (1895) describes how two men and their horse-drawn sleigh get lost in a snowstorm, although their destination is only a few kilometers away.

It was pitifully stupid to set out so late, and Saunders singles out one detail that the men keep coming across on their aimless wanderings: the clothesline on the outskirts of a village where they should have stayed right away.

Word for word, Saunders explains the subtle changes in what appears to be an insignificant subject and shows how the deadly danger intensifies through the varied portrayal of a banal detail.

The metaphorical world, says Frank Heibert's fabulous translation, "seeps gently into the material".