As winter threatened last year, I was hankering for a reading project. By that I mean that I wanted to read a series of books with a theme to tie them together. (I had just finished an autumn dedicated to reading gothic books, which was a great experience.)
Remembering how much I had enjoyed the drama of Anna Karenina one winter break during college, I decided to make a list of Russian fiction I’d never read. (Hopefully it goes without saying that this is not an endorsement of Putin or the war in Ukraine, a question author Elif Batuman reckoned with in the New Yorker).
My rules were simple: One books per author max, no Tolstoy (next time, War and Peace), no verse/poetry (personal preference), and always prefer contemporaneous works (written when they’re set). I also wanted to read them in chronologically order of when the story is set.
A primer
Before I started, I dutifully consulted a librarian for advice and recommendations. One of the books he recommended was A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. I had read Tenth of December years ago and hated it, but I figured if I was going to read 30 to 40 books by Russians, it was worth reading about 200 pages from an American professor about them first.
And I was so glad I did. Swim in a Pond is an incredible work. After reading it, I felt like a better reader and better human being. If you read or write short stories, Russian or otherwise, I highly recommend it.
(I’ll also note here that I also read The Possessed by Elif Batuman in preparation for this project. While Batuman is one of my favorite authors, I didn’t love this early work of hers.)
Ignorant of history
Did I read or learn anything about Russian history before or during this reading project? Nope. I selfishly (and arguably irresponsibly) just wanted to read novels in my cozy apartment while it snowed outside.
On choosing translations
Lest it not be clear, I cannot read a word of Russian. I am entirely in the hands of translators. Some of the books I chose to read are currently available in multiple English translations. When that was the case, I tried to find reviews comparing multiple translations and choose the one that appealed to me more, often choosing the latest translation.
The big names in this space are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who are known for their accuracy and literalness, and who translated the edition of Anna Karenina I loved in college.
19th Century Adventurism
At least in part, I came here for sweeping tales of old a la Anna Karenina, so I needed some military adventurism circa 1840. For that, I went with The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin and A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov.
Both of these focus on young, arrogant military officers ostensibly fighting in (horrifically violent) wars, but actually spending almost all their time and effort chasing woman and pleasure. This is particularly true of Lermontov’s misogynistic Pechorin, the eponymous hero (“hero”) of A Hero of Our Time. As Wikipedia summarizes:
It is an example of the superfluous man novel, noted for its compelling Byronic hero (or antihero) Pechorin and for the beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus.
Having heard of Pushkin for a while, I read Captain’s Daughter back in June 2023, but I remember it being a little less exaggerated and a fine story.
My favorite “Superfluous Man”
The first book from this project/list that really knocked me off my couch was Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, translated by Stephen Pearl. A solid five stars for me.
The titular Oblomov is, as Wikipedia again summarizes nicely, “a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. Throughout the novel, he rarely leaves his room or bed.” Apparently this puts Oblomov in the tradition of “superfluous men,” which seems like a nice way to describe how I feel sometimes here in my 30s.
As someone who’s recently spent a lot of time unemployed and lounging around, I will admit that this book hit a little too close to home for comfort.
I don’t have my copy with me right now, but one concept that hit me particularly hard was that in Oblomov’s nostalgia for his idyllic countryside childhood, he seems to want to skip to the “twilight” of life, rather than the noontime of accomplishments and adventures. As a physically disabled person who lived a privileged childhood, I feel a similar pull at times.
Let’s not forget the absurd
I generally do not love short stories. But after A Swim in the Pond in the Rain I decided to try The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Gogol is an interesting figure to read right now, as he is from Ukraine. In fact, the beautiful edition from Everyman’s Library, translated by Pevear & Volokhonsky, I treated myself to is separated into two sections: “Ukrainian Tales” and “Petersburg Tales.” I loved “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.”
Dostoevsky doesn’t hit
I broke one of my rules and read two books by Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. But dang, they just didn’t hit for me. Maybe I chose the wrong books?
1917: History strikes
Enough with these fancy aristocrats! Where is the communism?! Ten Days That Shook the World is a report from American reporter John Reed covering the 1917 Russian October Revolution. Reed, a socialist, is clearly sympathetic to the cause. But the main lesson I took from his book is just how chaotic and improvised the famed Revolution was.
Again, my lack of knowledge of Russian history is coming up here. But obviously I wanted to learn about these revolutions, and Reed’s book helped me get a lay of the land, politically.
I was also sure to get accounts from “everyday people” of this time. Here, I liked Earthly Signs by Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Jamey Gambrell) and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi (translated by Robert Chandler, Irina Steinberg, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anne Marie Jackson), which was surprisingly readable and funny.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is set during this time, and while I found it charming it didn’t quite fit with this project.
Two epics of arbitrariness
I had heard of Doctor Zhivago somewhere, but knew almost nothing about it, other than that it was probably a book I should read, especially if I was chasing the feeling that Russian epics like Anna Karenina had given me. And in general it did not disappoint. I wrote a separate post about how I was fascinated by how Pasternak played with realism and chance. It’s also just a great read (I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation).
A warning to potential readers: Zhivago has a ton of characters across a variety of settings. I think I ended up with six or seven pages of hand-written notes just to keep track of all the characters and their long Russian names. But I think it’s worth it.
For a slightly easier “epic,” I also liked The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge (translated from the French! by Willard R. Trask). I’d been interested in Serge since reading this article by Ben Lerner. This book gave a taste of the absurdity of the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.
Waiting in line in Stalin’s Russia
Maybe it was the amazing edition from Persephone Books, or reading it in a gorgeous study in a family home, but Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya (translated by Aline Werth) was just an incredibly good read for me.
Set in the time of Stalin’s purges, it follows a mother in search of information about her disappeared son which involves a lot of bureaucracy and standing in line. (For a more light-hearted exploration of Soviet line-waiting, I also liked The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Sally Laird.)
Honorable mentions for Envy by Yury Olesha (translated by Marian Schwartz) and The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov (translated by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson) if you want more from the (early) Stalin era.
A different kind of history of World War II
What’s your Dad’s favorite war? Mine’s is World War II, so I’ve seen a lot of masculine films about soldiers and battles starring Tom Hanks. Thus, I was intrigued when a librarian recommended The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
It’s essentially an oral history of women who fought for Russia in World War II (which Russians apparently call The Great Patriotic War). A really fascinating and important document. Once I was in to it a bit, it made sense that it won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. It even gets at some really interesting gender studies ideas I’d seen in the work of writers like Judith Butler. (If you’re interested in that, try The Soviet Woman by Alexandra Kollontai.)
Post-war cultural rebels
In my research for constructing this book list, I kept coming across the name Lyudmila Ulitskaya (though sometimes transliterated differently!). I certainly wanted to read more woman, so after looking over her body of work, I decided to try the longer The Big Green Tent (translated by Polly Gannon) first.
If we’re rating “epicness” by how many hand-written notes I ended writing to keep track of the plot, Big Green Tent weighs in at a respectable three pages. The story also fit very well in my project, since it’s about a very loose group of writers, artists and intellectuals who are rebelling against Soviet control of art. There’s even a humorous scene where a character is trying to hide an illicit copy of Doctor Zhivago. This work also addresses the Jewish experience in post-war Soviet Union, as well as an refreshing perspective on disability, something I find very interesting personally.
The New Yorker published a particularly nice and delicate chapter from the book a few years ago if you want a taste. Later in the project I tried The Body of the Soul, a new collection of her short stories, but I didn’t love it.
Getting trippy in the 1980s
Jumping to the 1980s, we get to The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin, a real stunner of a book. If you’re interested in how artists “sell out” or life at the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, I’d enthusiastically recommend this one.
While we’re in the 1980s, if you like the off-beat humor of the Chevy Chase film Fletch, you’ll like The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov. And if you like surreal books, check out Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin.
Life under Putin
I’ll be honest: I struggled to find fiction set after the fall of the Soviet Union that I liked. But I will definitely mention two books I read before I started this project: Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina and I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart, both of which deal with the violence caused by the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Here, I would be remiss not to mention I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko, a collection of reportage from an incredibly brave woman, whose reporting on the plight of intellectually and physically disabled Russians meant a lot to me.)
As author James Ward hypothesizes, maybe this lack of great fiction after approximately 1999 out of Russia and (easily) accessible to Westerners like me is because there hasn’t been a letting up of political repression on authors since the 1980s. The good news is that once there next “thaw” comes, we Westerners will get a few decades worth of new classics all within a few years.
While I’m ending this project, I’m not done looking for Russian fiction.
I hoped you picked up a few ideas for your reading list! I’m hoping to do a similar reading project for British books this summer.
Appendix: Full List of books read or attempted
(Not going to bother italicizing all these titles…)
- 1836 The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin
- 1840 A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
- 1842 The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol by Nikolai Gogol
- 1859 Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
- 1862 Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev
- 1864 Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky
- 1866 Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
- 1896 The Plays of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekov
- 1910s Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Frölich
- 1917 Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed
- 1917-1922 Earthly Signs by Marina Tsvetaeva
- 1918 A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
- 1918 Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi
- 1919 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- 1920 Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories by Isaac Babel
- 1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
- 1925 Professor Dowell’s Head by Alexander Belyaev
- 1922-1939 Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
- 1927 The Soviet Woman by Alexandra Kollontai
- 1927 Envy by Yury Olesha
- 1929 The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
- 1937 Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya
- Late 1930s The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
- 1939 Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms by Daniil Kharms
- 1939 Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski
- 1945 The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
- Early 1950s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Early 1970s The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin
- 1950s-1990s The Big Green Tent by Lyudmila Ulitskaya
- 1985 The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
- 1986 The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov
- early 1990s Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin
- 1996 Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko
- 2000s The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
- 2012 Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina
- 2010s I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko
- 2014 Living Pictures by Polina Barskova
- 2014 I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart
- 2017 In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova
- 2019 The Body of the Soul: Stories by Lyudmila Ulitskaya
- 2021 Wound by Oksana Vasyakina
- 2022 Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov
- 2022 Our Enemies Will Vanish by Yaroslav Trofimov
What Sam's Reading 