Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening.

That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasion but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.

The result is awkward, funny, and true, touched with the spirit of the (odd) person doing the telling.

One model of writing is that we strive upward to express ourselves precisely, at the highest levels of language (think Henry James). Another is that we surrender to our natural mode of expression, flawed though it may be, and, by way of concentrated work within that mode, raise it up, so to speak, creating a poetic rarefication of that (inefficient) form of expression.

When a corporate person says, “The stress being felt by some is, in terms of how we might view it is, we did not meet or exceed our goals that we all will remember Mark from Corporate communicated so clear last month in his critical missive,” that is a poem, because it is not right. There’s a true statement inside it (“We failed and are fucked”), but there’s also something true about its not-rightness, the flavor of which tells us things about the speaker and his culture that aren’t conveyed by “We failed and are fucked.”

So, it’s a poem: a machine for conveying bonus meaning.

So, life is mostly rational, with occasional bursts of absurdity.

Or, maybe: an assumption of rationality holds under normal conditions but frays under duress.

Some stories show us the process of rationality fraying under duress (Kolyma Tales, set in a Siberian work camp; The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a dystopian, misogynist future). “The Nose” suggests that rationality is frayed in every moment, even in the most normal of moments. But distracted by the temporary blessings of stability and bounty and sanity and health, we don’t notice.

Gogol is sometimes referred to as an absurdist, his work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning. But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are.

So, one way to get a story out of “the plane of its original conception” is to try not to have an original conception. To do this, we need a method. For me (and, I like to imagine, for Gogol, when he was in skaz mode) that method is to “follow the voice.” But there are many methods. Each involves the writer proceeding in a way that honors or helps her pursue something about which she has strong opinions. It could be that she has strong opinions (is delighted by) patterns of recurring imagery. She might have strong opinions about the way the words look on the page. She might be a sound poet, guided by some obscure aural principle even she can’t articulate. She might be obsessed with the minutiae of structure. It can be anything. The idea is that with her attention focused on that thing that delights her, about which she has strong opinions, she’s less likely to know too well what she’s doing and indulge in that knowing-in-advance that, as we’ve said, has a tendency to deaden a work and turn it into a lecture or a one-sided performance and drive the reader away.

Ivan’s speech is the stuff of an excellent essay: articulate, earnest, precisely expressed, supported with examples, infused with sincere intent. That’s why we believe it and why we’re moved by it. But then Chekhov makes double use of the speech by attributing it to Ivan. When Ivan, speaking through Chekhov, diverges from Chekhov (when, on page 9, he gets heated and cranky and inexact), Chekhov lets this be (“It’s not me, it’s him”) and allows the story to react to that new Ivan. Noticing this new aspect of Ivan he’s just discovered, Chekhov tracks him into that “big room in which stood two old wooden beds,” asking, “What might a person in such a state (agitated, frustrated, just having delivered a passionate speech that fell flat) do next?” And discovers an answer: “He might thoughtlessly forget to clean his pipe, then, spent, fall asleep.”

This allays our suspicion that the story is merely the occasion for an authorial lecture. Chekhov has it both ways: he gets the power of his heartfelt opinion (the truth of which we feel), destabilized by its attribution to Ivan (whose flaws we note).

If I’m writing in a character’s voice and he or she suddenly blurts something out, is that “me”? Well, sort of. That blurt came out of me, after all. But is it really “me”? Do I “believe” it? Well, who cares? There it is. Is it good? Any power in it? If so, it would be crazy not to use it. That’s how characters get made: we export fragments of ourselves, then give those fragments pants and a hairstyle and a hometown and all of that.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.

That’s it.

Over and over.

It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway,” said Randall Jarrell, a pretty good critic himself. “What is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.”

“Alyosha’s pathetic fate moves us to pity,” Clarence Brown said, “but most readers will wonder what exactly we are to do or refrain from doing as a result of reading about it.”

Right. We do wonder. We’ve seen such a cruel thing happen: a small life, with no pleasure in it, blossomed momentarily (a red jacket! a girlfriend!), and it seemed that Alyosha might have a chance to be loved, a chance even the humblest person deserves, but no, that possibility gets yanked away, for no good reason, and no one apologizes, because no one sees anything wrong with it.

In the scale of things, this is a small injustice, but imagine the number of such injustices that have occurred since the beginning of time. All of those people who were wronged in life and remained unavenged or unsatisfied or bitter or longing for love on their deathbeds (all of those people who found this life a frustration, a disappointment, a torment), what, for them, is the real end of the story of this life?

Well, aren’t we all, at some level, one of those people? Has it all gone perfectly for us down here? At this very moment, are you (am I) at total peace, completely satisfied? When the end comes, will you feel, “If only I could go back and do it over, I’d do it better, fighting boldly and fearlessly against all that would reduce me” or “All is well, I was the way I was, for better or worse, and now I’m leaving happily, to rejoin something bigger”?

Still, I often find myself constructing rationales for the beneficial effects of fiction, trying, in essence, to justify the work I’ve been doing all these years.

So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?

Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know—it really does it. That change is finite but real.

And that’s not nothing.

It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.

Essentially, before I read a story, I’m in a state of knowing, of being fairly sure. My life has led me to a certain place and I’m contentedly resting there. Then, here comes the story, and I am slightly undone, in a good way. Not so sure anymore, of my views, and reminded that my view-maker is always a little bit off: it’s limited, it’s too easily satisfied, with too little data.

And that’s an enviable state to be in, if only for a few minutes.