The Wolves of Russia

Last week, I read Willa Cather's My Ántonia for the first time. It was an interesting experience, because I found it very easy to read even though the pacing was slow. (I have a short attention span, so that doesn't usually happen.) The language of the book is beautiful, whether the subject matter in any given chapter is miserable or happy, which I think is the biggest factor in its enjoyability from cover to cover. It certainly isn't the narrator who makes it enjoyable. I'm not a huge fan of first person in general, and when it is used, I like for the narrator to actually have an active role in the story, but Jim Burden is incredibly passive and almost useless most of the time, however impressive (if biased) his powers of observation. He's a good storyteller (and a little bit too proud of that). He doesn't merely tell the story of his experiences surrounding Ántonia; he recounts the stories the other characters told him. These stories range from charming, like Ántonia's father's stories about Bohemia, to grisly, like the man who committed suicide by wheat thresher right in front of Ántonia.

One story, however, stands apart from the others as serious nightmare fuel: Russian Peter's confession about the reason he and Pavel left Russia. They were in a wedding party, happily traveling through the woods from the church ceremony to the banquet on a snowy winter's night, when they were set upon by hundreds of wolves. Peter and Pavel were in the lead sledge with the bride and groom, and after hearing and seeing the wolves overtake each sledge behind them one by one, their own horses beginning to lose strength. The village at last in sight, they threw the bride and groom out of their own sledge in order to ease their horses' burden and give themselves a better chance of survival. I had to sit there for a few minutes after I got to the end of Russian Peter's story to process my horror. Not to mention my disgust. Whatever happened to chivalry, to women and children first? I'm sure the bride wasn't weighing down the horses nearly as much as Peter and Pavel! Ugh.

But it gets better. I started Googling to see if there were/are really enough wolves in Russia for something like that to be plausible, and I stumbled across this little gem in the archives of the New York Times. Guess what, guys? Russian Peter's tale is based on a TRUE STORY that happened in Russia in 1911 (seven years before My Ántonia was published). Enjoy.

Edit: I have been invited to write about this discovery for the Cather Newsletter.