I studied Russian at university and can speak the language fluently. I was exposed to it from a young age because one of my grandfathers has a habit of asking every waitress who looks even vaguely Eastern-European if she is from Russia, or whether she at the very least speaks the language. Embarrassing as it’s always been, (his memory is not good enough to remember on subsequent visits to the same restaurant that he’s already asked the poor girl, even though the rest of us do remember), it still meant that I’d encountered the language long before I started it at school.
Russian literature has also always held a special place in my heart. I’d been intending to study English literature at university, and it was only a meeting with Dostoevsky and his Brothers Karamazov one winter that changed my mind – and indeed my life. From Dostoevsky I moved to other Russians – Turgenev, Tolstoy, and so on. I love the passion for life that the best of them have, and their constant, unceasing, search for answers. They inspire me to live my own life in the same way.
I have only recently started reading more recent authors – expect them to pop up from time to time too.
Russians
Alexander Pushkin is the Russian national poet and is absolutely phenomenal. He also wrote prose, of which I’ve written about the Tales of Belkin here.
Nikolai Gogol was one of the last great Russians to appeal to me, but having read through his collection of Petersburg Tales in Russian I’ve rather come around to him. He’s a funny figure with an odd life. His stories are likewise hilarious and highly imaginative, even if I eventually miss my realists. I’ve written on Nevsky Prospekt and the Diary of a Madman here, and I’ve also written on The Nose here.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, my darling, has unfortunately rather fallen in my estimation since I’ve started to read him in the original. I suppose I’ll stick to translations for his great novels. I’ve written on The Double here. I’ve also written on Crime and Punishment, and on A Gentle Spirit.
Leo Tolstoy now strikes me as the greatest of Russia’s 19th century writers, because he could actually write. Anna Karenina is the longest thing I’ve yet read in the original, but it’s certainly not the hardest, and once I’d finished all I wanted to do was just start it over again. I may not agree with a lot of his later views, but I’ve always admired his courage in trying to live according to them. From Tolstoy, so far, I have a translation of a short fragment, “I Just Couldn’t Help Myself.”, a piece on Hadji Murat, and on Father Sergius. Finally, I have a long essay complaining about certain tendencies in the later Tolstoy.
Ivan Turgenev, the most cosmopolitan of Russia’s writers, spent much of his life in Europe and corresponded with many big names in French and German literature (Flaubert, Storm, Fontane, etc). I have a look at his novella “Asya”.
Nikolai Leskov isn’t particularly well known, but he’s a fabulous storyteller, as Walter Benjamin points out. I’ve written a translation of his story, “A Righteous Man”, which you can read here. And I’ve written a few words on his well-known story, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Karolina Pavlova is one of the best known women writers of the 19th Century, but unfortunately she never achieved the preeminence of writers like the Bronte sisters in her lifetime. She is now being rediscovered in America. Her novel A Double Life is a funny and original, if uneven, look at the life of girls in the middle of the 19th century.
Another significant 19th century Russian woman writer was Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, whose story “A Boarding-School Girl” I look at here.
Evgeniy Baratynsky was one of the major poets of the early-mid 19th century, known as the Golden Age of Russian verse, alongside the likes of Pushkin, Batyushkov, Lermontov, and many others. I have tried translating some of his poems. And another one!
Speaking of poets, I have a translation of Nikolai Ogarev’s “The Wanderer” here.
Anton Chekhov wrote plays and stories. I have written on Ionych and poorly translated “Misery”.
Soviets
Isaac Babel was on my set text list for the exam I did last year. At first I didn’t like him – his writing is very consciously intellectual. Now, however, I appreciate the craftmanship that goes into his stories, even if I wouldn’t want to read them in Russian just yet. I’ve written my thoughts on his short story cycle Red Army Cavalry here, and I’ve also translated the first story, Crossing the Zbruch, here.
Andrei Platonov is another recently popularised find among the many Soviet writers who struggled to publish under Stalin. But unlike those who simply stopped publishing their writings, Platonov tried to toe the line. What this resulted in is a series of highly ambiguous stories, whose surface support for the government of the Soviet Union collapses under scrutiny. Platonov is also interesting for being a real Communist – he believed in the Soviet Union, but he couldn’t accept Stalin’s poor leadership of it. My thoughts on the collection Soul and Other Stories is here.
Valentin Rasputin is one of the main representatives of “village prose”, which was a nationalist literary movement in the latter part of the Soviet Union and beyond. I’ve written about his novella, “Money for Maria“, here.
Beyond the Soviets
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2015, is a Russian-language Belorussian writer. Her collection of interviews, Second-hand Time, is probably the best book I read in 2019.
Vladimir Nabokov is for most of us not a Russian writer, but an American one. Nonetheless, his early output was in Russian, and for completions’ sake I’ll leave him here. I’ve read his Strong Opinions, and his lovely little novel, Pnin.