Chekhov's Gun

Much of the second half of the novel plays out during the civil war that ravaged Russia from 1918 to 1922.  Yury found himself a captive of Liberius Mikulitsin's Red Army faction, which was fighting against Kolchak's White Army.  Life was pretty miserable for Yury during this time, as Liberius' faction pretty much housed themselves in earth huts in the great Russian taiga, hoping to hold out against the advances of the White Army until reinforcements came.  Yury tended to the wounded as best he could given the limited supplies.  He had support from a Czech paramedic who had joined the Communists and a couple of other interns. Pasternak uses these chapters to highlight the ravages of the civil war, noting the towns that were under siege, in particular Holycross.  All these towns along "The Highway" found themselves torn between the Red and White Armies, with split allegiances.  Many had been burned by one faction or the other, and morale among the armies ...

Varykino proved to be an all too short retreat for the Zhivagos.  They seemed to settle into a relatively comfortable domesticity at the old Krueger estate that once belonged to the Gromeko family.  Now it was state property, guarded by Mikulitsin and his second wife.  Yury seemed to envy the cozy house Mikulitsin lived in for its study, as he imagined himself returning to his writing after all the travails he had been through.   He and his family made due with one of the other outbuildings on the estate as Mikulitsin wouldn't allow them to live in the main house, much to Alexander Alexandrovich's chagrin. The time seemed idyllic.  The setting seemed more or less modeled upon Pasternak's home at Peredelkino , not the fabulous "Ice Palace," David Lean created in his version of the movie.  Yury grew closer to Tonya and Sasha.  Tonya became pregnant with another child.  He seemed to enjoy working the land, taking on the role almost that of a...

Pasternak lavishes a long chapter on the train ride to Varykino with Yury, Tonya and Gromeko seeking the isolation of the old Krueger estate to ride out the rest of the civil war.  Along the way, Pasternak offers grim notes of the strife that has ripped Russia in half.  At one small burned out station, everyone has to get off and help shovel the snow off the railway line as the dreaded Strelnikov had shelled the town recently, crushing one of the many rebellious provinces in Russia.  But, Yury seems to relish the bleakness.  It fits into the nihilism he has developed. Yury Zhivago is appearing more and more like a Turgenev character, a throwback to 19th century "revolutionaries" rather than a Bolshevik or a Menshevik.  While his wife and father-in-law see the estate as their only chance for survival, Yury seems to view it as a means to rediscover the Russian heartland. He and Alexander Alexandrovich discuss the fate of Russia while Tonya looks after little ...

Rosamund Bartlett weighs in on Tolstoy in a new biography that has garnered mixed reviews.  Rather than offering fresh insights,  Christopher Tayler writes that she plays this one by the numbers.  Of course, it is hard to top the previous biographies by Troyat and Wilson.

 After serving on the front line for over a year, Yury returns to Moscow to find a city reduced to groveling for firewood to keep warm against the oncoming winter.  He finds his home among the ruins of the city only to be forced to wait until finally Tonya comes down to greet him.  It is an awkward homecoming as Yury finds his son a toddler who runs for cover when he enters.  As best he can he tries to resume the life he formerly had with no mention and apparently not even any thoughts of Lara.    Pasternak has a wonderful eye for detail in this chapter and those that follow, capturing the sense of a city and a country at its lowest point, unsure which direction the revolution will take.  He paints a portrait of the fledgling house administrations and the chaos that surrounds the city as the provisional government struggles for control.  Yury seems to have adopted a fatalistic view, taking each day as it comes. In these chapters, we a...

Seems the first three chapters serve as little more than introduction.  Pasternak chooses to sketch these chapters, culminating in Lara's attempt to strike back at her tormentor Komarovsky at the Sventitsky's Christmas Party.  Again, Yury is there to witness the event and finds himself once again drawn to this mysterious woman who would come to dominate his thoughts and emotions. Pasternak then thrusts his protagonists into the war.  Yury is consigned to a field hospital in which the ravages of war quickly dispense of his innocence.  He meets with Misha again and a much more cynical world view emerges.  Lara had signed on as a nurse in search of her husband Pasha Antipov, leaving her daughter with a close friend in Moscow.  Yury has also left his family behind, witnessing the birth of his son to Tonya shortly before being sent to the front.  Essentially, here begins the story. Yury doesn't actually meet Lara until the fifth chapter, Farewell to th...

Interesting how Pasternak tells his tale of Yury and Lara in parallel episodes, keeping Yury pretty much above the seismic shifts taking place in Russia, while Lara finds herself at street level.  Pasternak opens with a boyhood tale of Yury that was a lot like Chekhov's The Steppe , with young Yury being taken through the countryside on a troika with his uncle and a local priest, after the young boy lost his mother.  This idyllic reverie is broken by the fateful news that someone has committed suicide by throwing himself off a train.  Unknown to Yury this is his father.  Pasternak also uses the scene to introduce the young Misha Gordon, who would become Yury's lifelong friend, and the contemptible Komarovsky, a lawyer who had apparently aided Yury's father in making his jump. Komarovsky is portrayed essentially as a snake in the grass, tangentially bringing ruin on Yury, although the young boy had no contact with his father, and despoiling young Lara in the succee...

In a cinematic world increasingly dominated by CGI it is great that there are still animators like Yuriy Norshteyn who painstakingly pore over every detail of their work, taking 30 years if necessary to bring a story dear to his heart to life.  This is the case with The Overcoat, an animated feature Yuriy started back in the late 70s, of which he has only provided glimpses to the public like this one .  He says he has some 25 minutes of this feature completed to date.  He planned to show the film in 2007, but it remains unfinished.  Here's more on the long overdue Overcoat .

Interesting to read that Boris Pasternak's father, Leonid Osipovich , was an accomplished portrait artist and took Boris with him to Astapovo station to see Tolstoy before his death.  Pasternak had painted and sketched several portraits of Tolstoy over the years, including this one of the Count at Yasnaya Polyana in the late 1890s.  I love this painting entitled The Night Before the Examination .

I have to say I like the British book cover better than the American one , but it is between the covers that counts, and it seems in this case you get the same narrative.  Ann Pasternak Slater is not happy with the literal Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, preferring the more lyrical original English translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.  You can read her review in the Guardian. I did notice that P-V can be too literal in previous translations like that of The Master and Margarita , to the point of calling Bezdomny "Homeless" throughout the book, when it would have sufficed to provide a footnote that the surname Bulgakov used means "homeless."  In that case, I preferred the earlier Michael Glenny translation. It has been a long time since I read the Hayward-Harari translation so it will be hard to compare, but from what I read in Richard Pevear's introduction he and Larissa Volokhonsky have chosen to maintain the awkwardness of Pasternak's ori...

‘I heartily recommend taking as often as possible Chekhov’s books … and dreaming through them as they are intended to be dreamed through’   -- Vladimir Nabokov For those with an unbridled passion for Anton Chekhov there is this box set of Collected Stories , weighing in at 1400 pages, bound in buckram, that would be a very handsome addition to any book shelf.  It appears to be lavishly illustrated as well.  I have a copy of The Shooting Party which I cherish.

I've been enjoying the bits and pieces of the literature and theater of the absurd which characterized a part of the Russian avant-garde in the late 1920s.  Daniil Kharms kick started the movement with his reading of the OBERIU manifesto in 1928, although the organization apparently dates back to 1926 ( read more ).  Kharms along with several others contributed greatly to this movement, and many of their writings have been collected into anthologies like The Man with the Black Coat and OBERIU - An Anthology of Russian Absurdism .  In many ways, this movement seemed to echo that of the Italian Futurists and Dadaism, but the Russian absurdists tended to shun all political relationships, preferring to explore universal ideas and playing these ideas out on stage with the theater group, Radix.  Nice to see this movement getting more attention.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's book of Scary Fairy Tales , which includes There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby , interests me more.  Especially now with Halloween approaching.  Excellent review in the NYTimes . Russians have long been fascinated with the macabre, psychics and false prophets.  And, don't forget all those stories of rapacious wolves.  I suppose those long winter nights have a lot to do with it.  There is a long history of horror and supernatural tales dating back to Aleksey Tolstoy .  Perhaps his most famous Gothic work is Vampires: Stories of the Supernatural .  Even Gogol's Dead Souls conjures up the dead in its own beguiling way, and Dostoevsky long had a fascination with the dark side in all his characters that at times bordered on the macabre. I can only imagine that Petrushevskaya draws on this rich tradition in her haunting stories.

A friend mentioned Ludmila Ulitskaya the other day and the name sounded familiar.  Sure enough, I had a copy of Sonechka: A Novella and Stories sitting on my shelf and read Sonechka that night.  Odd little story as it seems more a sketch for a broader novel that Ulitskaya had in mind than a novella.  The story starts to get quite complicated as Sonechka's elderly husband finds himself infatuated with their daughter's beguiling friend, Jasia, a Polish girl who was trying to re-invent herself in Moscow in the late 70s.  Sonechka seems oblivious to these events swirling around her, remaining devoted to her books which consoled her during her mundane childhood and years in a public library.  You expect more to come out of this story, but it doesn't.  It just trails off with Sonechka once again absorbing herself in her books. The story is quite interesting, as Sonechka was born out of WWII whereas Robert, her husband, was a well-known artist who had managed...

The Fatal Eggs is another little gem by Mikhail Bulgakov.  It has been translated several times, including this excerpt from a recent translation by Michael Karpelson.  It was even made into a movie, Rokovye yaytsa by Sergei Lomkin in 1996.   The story takes place in the near future, narrated from a time four years beyond which Bulgakov wrote the novella in 1924.  It concerns the fateful discovery of a ray of red light, artificially produced, that creates drastic effects in microscopic offspring, and eventually in frogs.  Bulgakov, a doctor by training, infuses his story with enough clinical terms to make it all seem quite possible, as was the case in Heart of a Dog .  The story appears to delight mostly in a H.G. Wells-like vision of the future, but is not without its social allegory of early Soviet times, leading censors to question his intents.

Pushkin wrote The Bronze Horseman in part as a response to Mickiewicz's The Monument of Peter the Great.  Mickiewicz had been jailed and forced into exile following the student uprising at the University of Vilnius in 1823.  Mickiewicz had been protesting the oppression of Lithuania and Poland following the partitions first made by Peter the Great, and continued with his daughter Catherine, who had the bronze sculpture of her father on horseback erected in St. Petersburg.  To Mickiewicz, Peter was an usurper, not a liberating force, and creates an imaginary conversation between Pushkin and himself which Marinus Wes describes in his book Between Two Horsemen . Mickiewicz was more explicit in his text than Pushkin was in his response.  Pushkin took the statue as having a dark side, in the way it came to life and chased down a bedraggled Yevgeny, who carried with him the scars of the 1824 flood.  The only direct reference to Mickiewicz is a footnote, Micki...

So often referenced in literature and reproduced on stage many times is Alexander Griboyedov's Gore ot Uma (Woe from Wit).  Here is a subtitled scene from a 1998 production of the play, featuring Oleg Menshikov, and a clip from the 1952 movie, or you can view the 1998 production in its entirety in Russian . Griboyedov, like Lermontov, had a hard time getting his plays past the censors in his time.  Written in 1823, it was not published in full until 1861, although many versions of the play appeared in the years in between.  A number of the catch phrases have since become part of the Russian language.

After watching a Lithuanian production, Mistras , I found myself looking for some perspective on Paris in 1848 and found Herzen's section of his time in Paris from 1847-1852 in My Past and Thoughts .  What a fascinating time!  While the play focuses mostly on Adam Mickiewicz, Herzen takes in a broader section of the revolutionary ferment, noting how Mickiewicz had fallen under the influence of Towiański and had become much too religion for his taste. Herzen's sympathies laid more with persons like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon , who tried to keep a respectable paper going in the face of mounting governmental censorship, while being held in jail. Herzen was one of the more famous Russian emigres in Paris.  He was great friends with Turgenev and sat with him when Turgenev felt he had come down with cholera, which was sweeping Paris at the time.  Fortunately for Turgenev he had a much lesser malady and was able to recover after a fortnight. As Issiah Berlin noted in the f...

Maskaradas has become a staple of the Fall season, and one we've watched several times.  Lermontov had a hard time getting this play staged in his day.  Vladimir Golstein notes that the poet made drastic revisions to please censors, but it wasn't until 11 years after Lermontov's death that the play was first seen. Rimas Tuminas first staged the play in Vilnius in 1997.  He is currently directing Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre.

  My wife and I had been looking forward to the premiere of Ana Karenina , a modern dance production by Anželika Cholina .  We weren't disappointed.  Cholina appeared to take the story from the point of view of Ana, creating a dream-like atmosphere in which Ana wrestles (at times quite literally) with the tempest of emotions inside her.  The Kitty-Levin story serves more as counterpoint, with Levin portrayed as an oafish man, dogging Kitty through the first act before bringing her to his estate and marrying her in the second act. Beata Molytė shines as Ana, overwhelming the rather sober looking Vronsky, as portrayed by Gintaras Visockis.  Torn by her passion for Vronsky, her place in society and her love for her son, Ana plays out these emotions on stage, at times bordering on the hallucinatory, in keeping with the emotions she for the most part kept suppressed in the novel, until her tragic end, which Cholina handled beautifully.  She portrays Ana as d...

I was bemused by this article by Dara Horn on Teaching Tevye .  I'm not sure where Dara is coming from, but I think she should take a closer look at the stories in question, because Tevye is no "ignoramus," and the quotes he takes from the Bible and Talmud may seem broad and sometimes out of context, but as Hillel Halkin noted in his introduction, were in most cases  a propos , as we must remember that Sholem Aleichem is speaking through Tevye as he relates the changing face of Yiddish life in Ukraine. These stories, ostensibly about the marriages and misfortunes of Tevye and his daughters, serve to tell us about various forces shaping Yiddish life.  One daughter marries a revolutionary, and moves to Siberia to be with him after he serves his jail term.  Another marries an Orthodox boy, with Tevye finding it very difficult to reconcile himself with the loss of his daughter to the local priest, who appears to gloat over this conversion.  Another...

I found myself asking if Petersburg constituted the first "Post-Modern" novel?  So many of the elements we now regard as "Post-Modern" are right here in Bely's "Astral Novel" from 1913.  Seems that the Post-Modernists stole from the pages of Symbolist literature. Bely shifts back and forth in time effortlessly, with the events in the novel all taking place within a span of two days.  The ticking clock inside the homemade bomb, hidden in a sardine can, comes to dominate the second half of the novel.  The tension is wonderfully wrought, as Bely moves back and forth between a handful of characters in those fateful hours of the strikes that would bring about the first Russian revolution of 1905.  Nikolai  Apollonovich finds himself breaking these hours down into seconds, with each one ticking away slowly on a collision course with "zero." Meanwhile, his father contemplates the distance that has grown between his son and him, and in snooping ...

I find myself reading Sholem Aleichem's stories of Tevye the Dairyman , after finishing Petersburg (more on Petersburg later).  I have a translation by Hillel Halkin, who also writes a lengthy forward describing the Jewish condition in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the time in which these stories are set.  Aleichem eventually immigrated to America, as many Eastern European Jews did during this time, escaping the harsh tsarist rule that had consigned them to the Pale of Settlement .  Still, some Jews prospered as Aleichem noted in his amusing introductory chapter, as Tevye meets a wealthy family from Yehupetz (Kiev) in an odd and round about way. The stories are filled with religious anecdotes as Tevye tries to come to terms with his lowly place in the world.  These amusing reveries are passed along to Aleichem, who sets himself as the narrator of these stories.  Halkin noted that Aleichem used a number of pen names, this being th...

Here is a wonderful adaptation of Gogol's classic short story, The Nose , by Alexander Alexeieff from 1963.

Bely draws on Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman as his inspiration for Petersburg , prefacing each part with pieces from the immortal poem.  In this poem we find a young man, who the narrator has chosen to call Yevgeny, driven mad by the destruction wrought from the flood of 1824 , which destroyed his his love's home and cast about its inhabitants if after a battle.  Yevgeny wanders around for a year in a state of delirium eventually coming upon the bronze sculpture of Peter, at which he hurls his abuses, only for the menacing statue to come to life and chase him through the streets of Petershburg and to his doom.  With the popularity of the poem, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great became known as The Bronze Horseman . The Neva figures heavily into the poem, like an untamed beast, whose waves plunge the city into chaos.  It took decades for the city to bring the waters under control with a series of locks and canals...

Pasternak to Isaiah Berlin, ".. of course Andrey Bely was a genius – Petersburg, Kotik Letaev are full of wonderful things – I know that, you need not tell me – but his influence was fatal." and what did Berlin think of Andrei Bely? "... a man of strange and unheard-of insights – magical and a holy fool in the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy." here's more .  ____________________________________________ Andrei Bely (1905) as seen by Leon Bakst .

Sergei Eisenstein goes back two years before the first Russian Revolution to the strikes of 1903 and the subsequent suppression that followed in his feature length debut, Стачка .  The film was made in 1925 and was steeped in revolutionary references, including the famous scene near the end of the film where he compares the suppression to cows being slaughtered at the abbotoirs.  He would go onto make Броненосец Потёмкин (Battleship Potemkin) that same year, which dealt with the mutiny that occurred in 1905.  His strong visual style would become the hallmark of early Soviet film.

As I read Petersburg , first published in 1916, I probably could use a few more annotations, as there are so many references that if you aren't fully knowledgeable of the events that surrounded the 1905 uprising , you will find yourself missing a lot of them.  My overall sense of the novel is that Andrei Bely was channeling Gogol while setting his characters against each other like chess pieces.  Each chapter seems to represent a "move," or series of moves, leading toward a fateful ending.  I can see why this is one of Nabokov's favorite books from the 20th century, as it has much of the sardonic wit and clever juxtaposition of characters that you read in Nabokov's books. A new translation by John Elsworth apparently breathes more life into the novel.  I have been reading the Cournos translation, which I haven't found that stilted, as Katya Galitzine notes in her review of the book, but am curious to read the Elsworth translation as he goes back to the ...

On a lighter note, one of my favorite Soviet animated features is Hedgehog in the Fog , made by Yuriy Norshteyn in 1975, and winner of numerous international awards in the years that followed.  Norshteyn has done a number of other wonderful animated features, but has yet to finish his long overdue adaptation of The Overcoat .

Don't know quite what to make of this early short novel by Chekhov.  He seems to be presenting young Egor as the future of Russia as the boy finds himself thrust into a journey across the limitless Steppe with his uncle and a bishop in a mad race to catch up with the mysterious Varlamov.  While this action propels the first half of the story, it seems little more than a way to hold the reader's attention as Chekhov seems more interested in describing the vast prairie land of his mother country and Egorushka's impressions, as he is being taken to a boarding school in a distant town. Along the way we are treated to some rather odd characters sketches such as two Jewish brothers where the  shabby covered chaise stops briefly as the boy's uncle, Ivan Kuzmitchov, tries to gauge how distant Varlamov remains on the road.  The description of the Jewish brothers would make many readers today cringe, as they are cast as gross caricatures.  Forced to sit for a cup of ...

While technically a war movie, Tarkovsky chooses to take a more abstract approach to the ravages of war in My Name is Ivan .  We find a young Ivan moving between blissful reveries with his mother and sister by a minimalist lake shore to those where he is seen penetrating behind German lines during WWII, bringing back reconnaissance to numbered Soviet commanders. The war scenes are presented realistically while the idyllic beach scenes are far more dream like, but in watching it again I'm not convinced the war scenes are real.  Rather, a product of his imagination, especially the use of code in the beginning and the counting he does with the twigs, berries and seeds in the young lieutenant's office.  I think Tarkovsky purposefully tried to keep the relationship between the conflicting images ambiguous, using marvelous camera work such as the scene where young Ivan drifts off to sleep and moves up a well in his dream to the image of he and his mother looking down a well....

The Golden Calf sounds a lot like a modern update of Dead Souls .  In this case Ostap Bender rides through the Hinterlands in a yellow jalopy in search of an elusive millionaire.  Sounds like a good translation.  As Mark Twain once wrote in The Awful German Language , it is very hard to translate humor. Ilf and Petrov love the idea of searching out millions, probably best characterized in The 12 Chairs , which Mel Brooks made into a movie back in 1970.  Here's the classic Soviet version directed by Mark Zakharov and featuring Andrei Mironov as Bender, but alas no subtitles.  Well worth the look just the same. Also great fun is the adventures of Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip .

Seems everyone is celebrating Chekhov these days.  Two new films, Ward No. 6 and The Duel came out this past year, and many earlier films were being screened at festivals such as this one sponsored by the NW Film Center of the Portland Art Museum, this past May, which included Soviet classics such as The Seagull (1970), directed by Yuli Karasik. Of course, The Seagull is one of those favorites that has been done several times, including this earlier version by Sidney Lumet .  I guess the main draw of Chekhov is that he still appears so modern more than 100 years after his untimely death.

I continue to work my way through Chekhov's short novels, although not in chronological order.  I finished My Life (1896) the other night.  It is told through the point of a young man with the ostentatious name of Misail, who has opted for a workingman's life, much to the indignation of his father, the town architect.  Chekhov uses this character to voice his own misgivings about growing up in a provincial city of 60,000 inhabitants.  He offers a number of interesting character studies, including an amusing view of local theater. Initially, Misail finds himself having as difficult finding a place among the workers as he did among bureaucrats, but in times settles on housepainting as his vocation, representing the flip side to his father.  Misail lives among the poor as he struggles to shed his noble bearing.  His father can't stand it and repeatedly tries to get his son to change his ways, but to no avail.  When Misail attracts the attention of som...

Here is an abridged copy of Troyat's magisterial biography of Tolstoy .  Unfortunately, there are only a few pages from the Last Days of Tolstoy's life with all the arguments over Tolstoy's diaries which Chertkov had in his possession and Sofiya (or Sonya as Troyat calls her) very much wanted returned.  Tolstoy kept promising they would be returned but apparently Chertkov retained them.  Anyway, she felt great animosity toward Chertkov which was reflected in the movie. You can buy a second hand copy of Troyat's biography from Abebooks and other sources at very low prices.

Here is a copy of the obituary from the New York Times, dated November 20,1910.  It is noted, ASTAPOVA, Sunday, Nov. 20.--Count Tolstoy died at 6:05 this morning. The Countess Tolstoy was admitted to the sickroom at 5:50. Tolstoy did not recognize her. When one of the heart attacks seized him Tolstoy was alone with his eldest daughter, Tatina. He suddenly clutched her hand and drew her to him. He seemed to be choking, but was able to whisper:  "Now the end has come; that is all." 

Interesting to find out that Chertkov helped create The Free Age Press when exiled in London in 1897.  This is where he met up with the Maudes who would eventually translate much of Tolstoy into English, and Aylmer Maude would write the biography The Life of Tolstoy Later Years .  But, it would seem that Chertkov and the Maudes had a falling out, judging by this undated letter from Tolstoy.  Interesting that he praises their translations.  I don't know how well Tolstoy understood English, but the Maude translations have been raked over the coals in the years that followed, most notably by Nabokov.

I finally had a chance to watch The Last Station and have to say enjoyed it, largely because of  Helen Mirren's marvelous performance as Sofiya.  She really held this movie together, as it threatened to devolve into a rather tedious melodrama at times.  Christopher Plummer gave Count Tolstoy the weight he deserves on screen, and the rapport between he and his wife was very good, particularly the wonderful bedroom scene. I was a bit bemused by the portrayal of Vladimir Chertkov .  He comes across as such a cad.  From what I've read, Chertkov was completely devoted to Tolstoy's legacy, and wasn't trying to steal the estate out from under Sofiya, as was implied in this movie.  He organized a new publishing house, Intermediary , in 1885 at Tolstoy's initiative, which published Chekhov, Leskov, Ertel, as well as Tolstoy.  Here is Chertkov with Tolstoy, and a book Chertkov published of his Last Days with Tolstoy.  Chertkov came from a wealthy ba...

I wouldn't call it light reading, but The Life of Insects is a book you can consume at one sitting.  You will probably find yourself wanting to reread parts of it, particularly the interesting dialog between fellow moth-men, Mitya and Dima, which as their names imply appear as two halves of the same coin. Viktor Pelevin's short novel from the early 90s is not so easy to categorize.  Some have viewed as allegory, others as science fiction and fantasy.  It would seem Pelevin took his cue from a few lines of Brodsky, I sit in my garden and the lamp is burning. Not a single lover, friend or servant. Not a single lord or beggar present Nothing but the harmony of insects' droning. not Kafka as many persons would like to think.  Pelevin purposely keeps the reader off balance with all the shape-shifting that takes place as his insect humans move freely back and forth from one form to another. The book essentially follows three stories with three other short pie...