A horse jumping over three ponies (detail). Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

I’ve never much liked horses. The first time I meet my sister-in-law is at the stables, where she keeps an enormous bay stallion with the same name as her brother, my husband. When the two of them were younger, this caused confusion: it was hard to tell which Václav she was talking about; which one, horse or boy, had behaved badly. Playing willing is a newcomer’s role in any family scene, so I ride my sister-in-law’s horse when she insists. This Václav is old, gentle, and toothless. Still, I cling to the reins. I’m much too afraid of falling. Later, in the car on the way back to the city, my sister-in-law tells me about the astronomical sums of money the animal consumes each month and the two jobs she juggles to pay for his keep, and I think of the opening of Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which a father, Strepsiades, listens to his son, Pheidippides, as he sleeps and dreams of chariot races, and laments that “his madness for horses has shattered my fortune.”

I prefer to encounter horses at a safe distance. The difference between the immaterial horses who have galloped through my reading and the material horses that surprise me on walks in the countryside, big and breathing heavily, sidling up to fences with their long tongues lolling and buzzing with flies, never stops surprising me. Like death in a tragedy, the horses in Greek theater always seem to be happening offstage. In the final scene of Euripides’s Hippolytus, the battered body of the eponymous subject is hauled out for us to see; after being terrified by Poseidon, Hippolytus’s horses dashed his chariot against the rocks. The gravely injured boy then reconciles with his father, Theseus, before giving up the ghost. A messenger lets us know that the horses themselves have disappeared. He doesn’t know where.

The Clouds was first staged at the City Dionysia in 423 B.C.E., where it came last in the competition, much to Aristophanes’s disappointment. (A year later, in The Wasps, he lambasted the undeserving audience, putting a stirring self-defense in the mouths of his chorus: “Last year you betrayed him, when he sowed the most novel ideas … none ever heard better comic verses.”) Throughout the play, a satire of the rampant philosophizing of the time, horses and ideas are opposed, the earthly arena of the former contrasted with the celestial flurry of the latter. When Strepsiades first encounters Socrates, the thinker is suspended in the air in a basket; the status of contemplation is literally lofty. As Strepsiades watches, Socrates beseeches the clouds, which carry our thoughts, to grant the bankrupt man the gift of philosophy (which will help him escape his creditors). In this novel cosmology, there is no Zeus, no Helios and his horses to pull the sun across the sky, just the Whirlwind that sets bloated, colicky ideas thumping up against one another. Strepsiades learns what Socrates has to teach him and is so taken by the philosopher’s ideas that he sends Pheidippides to study in Socrates’s stable of disciples (for which Aristophanes invented the word phrontistērion, meaning “place of pondering,” and which is often translated, hilariously, as “thoughtery”). The dialogues that follow leave the spectator suffering from a kind of rhetorical whiplash, surrounded by absurdities on all sides. The satire is so punishing that in his Apology, Plato, Socrates’s real student, portrays Aristophanes as partially responsible for the negative public image that led to the execution of his mentor some twenty-four years later.

By the end of The Clouds, Pheidippides has been transformed into an adroit reasoner. During his time in the Thoughtery he becomes pale and emaciated and equivocal; his warm-blooded, horse-loving nature disappears for good. It turns out that, for Strepsiades, a son who doesn’t love horses is a son who doesn’t love anything. Soon after his great alteration, Pheidippides beats his father and uses his newfound reason to justify doing so: “When I thought only about horses, I was not able to string three words together without a mistake, but now that the master has altered and improved me and that I live in this world of subtle thought, of reasoning and of meditation, I count on being able to prove satisfactorily that I have done well to thrash my father.”

After listening to my sister-in-law describe her own financial ruin, I decide that if I ever have a child, they will never know that a horse is a thing you can have. I hope that for them horses will be mere scenery, as innocuous as hedgerows, barely worth comment. My distrust of horses goes beyond the desire to save some money, because in some essential way I agree with Aristophanes’s Socrates that what’s most interesting is the world that we have fabricated, the figures that we set against one another. The horses worthy of attention, I will insist, are the horses that carry our metaphors. I’m not convinced that this is true, but I have always struggled to recognize animals beneath their coverings of meaning. They are always more useful to me that way.

***

I would describe Turgenev’s “The End of Chertopkhanov” as a story about the difficulty of recognizing a horse. It’s possibly the saddest story I know.

The first description of its protagonist arrives one story earlier in A Hunter’s Album, the collection in which this work appears. In “Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin,” Chertopkhanov cuts a ridiculous if endearing figure, with puffy cheeks and glassy eyes darting about “as if he were drunk.” When the narrator visits Chertopkhanov in the village of Bessonovo, he is described shuffling around his gloomy dwelling in a greasy dressing gown, with his wasp-faced lover, Masha, and penniless confidant, Nedopyuskin. (I imagine something like the decaying Beale family home of Grey Gardens, only Russian and sometimes mirthful.) By the time “The End of Chertopkhanov” comes about, Chertopkhanov’s lover has disappeared and his friend has died, and he falls into ruin soon after. The only thing that lifts his cloud of despair is the appearance of an excellent horse, whom Chertopkhanov calls Malek Adel.

This horse is the unexpected reward for a good deed, and he arrives like something from a fairy tale, ridden into town by the scruffy little man, known only as “the Jew,” whom Chertopkhanov had earlier saved from being murdered by a group of anti-Semitic peasants. When Chertopkhanov sees Malek Adel for the first time, his heart starts “hammering in his breast.” Like Pheidippides, “he was a passionate devotee of horse-flesh and knew a good horse when he saw one.” He accepts the Jew’s ridiculously low price, and takes the horse. Malek Adel becomes the center of his small world. The nature of his value is not made clear: Though the narrator assumes that Chertopkhanov prizes Malek Adel for how splendid he makes him seem to his neighbors, Turgenev’s description of how the horse appears through his owner’s eyes is so emotional, so full of feeling. A more generous reader might think that the down-on-his-luck aristocrat has found something to love at last.

Then Malek Adel vanishes. Chertopkhanov is woken up from a bad dream by the sound of distant neighing. His loss has a formal, strident quality: confronted with the empty stable, “Chertopkhanov’s head began to spin just as if a bell had begun to toll in his skull.”

It’s funny that the story is called “The End of Chertopkhanov,” because what makes it tragic is Turgenev’s refusal to end on any of its gradually escalating losses. Chertopkhanov is not finished by the disappearance of his lover, the death of his friend, or even by the theft of Malek Adel. If he were, the story would merely be sad. Instead, Chertopkhanov is broken by the return of his horse and his growing fear that this horse, although in all aspects the same, is not in fact Malek Adel.

After a yearlong quest and the fairy-tale-ish recovery of Malek Adel from a distant marketplace, a story that he recounts to his astonished groom, Perfishka, Chertopkhanov falls into a pattern of obsessive doubt and compulsive behavior. There is not only something implausible about Malek Adel’s reappearance but something newly strange in his character. He begins to worry that this horse is not Malek Adel after all: “He almost constantly … subjected Malek Adel to examination, riding off a great distance and then testing him, or, creeping into the stable, locking the door behind him and standing right in front of the horse’s head, he’d start looking him in the eyes and asking in a whisper: ‘Are you he? Is it you? Is it you?’ and then he’d either study him, intently, hour after hour, or, in an access of joy, he’d mutter: ‘Yes, it’s him! Of course it’s him!’ or then again he’d be doubtful and even be covered in confusion.” His former happiness gives way to torment: the renewed presence of the horse is even worse than its absence. The endless demand for certainty that the challenge of loving again necessitates for Chertopkhanov slowly crushes him. The story is what the philosopher Stanley Cavell might call a tragedy of skepticism, and it ends much as can be expected: Chertopkhanov shoots the horse that he can no longer bear to be around.

But I try to make myself remember that the story isn’t just Chertopkhanov’s tragedy but Malek Adel’s too. All these troubled ways of looking—associative, symbolic, allegorical, skeptical, suspicious—enact their own peculiar violence on whatever they take as an object. The projection leaves a trail of destruction in its wake.

***

Soon after I read Turgenev’s story for the first time, my friend Veronika takes a photograph of a horse during an unguarded moment on the Sussex Downs. I like it so much that it becomes my desktop background for the next six years. Whenever I look at it, I feel as if I’m seeing an animal for the first time. This horse is so obvious, so absolutely unselfconscious. It’s so much realer than any other horse I’ve encountered, even the ones that I’ve ridden. At first I think that my impression must come from the positioning of the horse’s head in the center of the frame or that it belongs to the strange brightness of the image, but then I decide it’s just a great example of what a photograph can do. In The World Viewed, Cavell describes the way that photography levels hierarchy, reducing the primacy of the human figure: “Photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not ontologically favored over the rest of nature, in which objects are not props but natural allies (or enemies) of the human character.” Perhaps if Veronika were to spend her life photographing horses, I’d find it harder to dismiss them. It would make for a more crowded world, at least.

Photograph by Veronika Korjagina.

In the end it turns out that I need the real horse, too. After my daughter is born I feel as if just about anything could happen to her. My friend’s wife suggests that I put iron underneath her crib. Following tradition, this is supposed to protect a baby from witchcraft, but she says it might help with all the other stuff too. In the absence of certainty, a newly dangerous world, this seems better than doing nothing. I text my sister-in-law and she brings me one of Václav’s iron horseshoes the very next day. Together we stand by the crib and look at it. The shoe is so ugly, the metal is corroded and, in some places, rusted through, and there’s a flaky white substance on one side that I think must be either glue or old keratin. It’s nothing like the smooth, lucky symbol I imagined, just matter, something material at last. We put it there anyway.

Quotes taken from the following translations: Aristophanes: The Eleven Comedies (1912), trans. unknown; Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1990), trans. Richard Freeborn.