Wintering with Russian Fiction

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 book 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 chronological order, based on 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.)

(Remaining) 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. I did learn some Russian history through these novels and their introductions. In fact, it might be wrong to assume there exists a strict divide between history and fiction…

On choosing translations

Lest it not be clear, I cannot read a word of Russian. I was and am entirely in the hands of English 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 the available translations and choose the one that appealed to me most, often deferring to the most recent translation.

The big names in this space are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a translating team and couple known for their accuracy and literalness — they translated the edition of Anna Karenina I loved in college. (Here’s a recent profile of them.)

19th century adventurism

At least in part, I came here for sweeping tales of old, a la Anna Karenina. I found a taste of this in tales of military adventurism circa 1840, namely 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 of their time and effort chasing women 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…”

Having known of Pushkin for a while, I read Captain's Daughter back in June 2023, but I remember it being a little less exaggerated that Lermontov’s satire 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, and may be a larger trend in the West these days.

One image 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. It seems to me that Russians of this era (see Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons) take the threat of nihilism seriously, in a way that I don’t think our modern American society does.

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 and Volokhonsky, I treated myself to is separated into two sections: "Ukrainian Tales" and "Petersburg Tales." You can feel the shift between sections: the first is (apparently) more inspired by Ukrainian folk tales. But Gogol feels more powerful in the second half — I particularly loved "The Nose" and "The Overcoat."

Dostoevsky doesn't hit

I broke one of my rules and gave Dostoevsky not one but two chances: 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 journalist 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. I need to check the book, but I think the brand new “Finance Minister” was just the closest man with book-keeping experience. (It later served as inspiration for the 1981 3-hour film Reds, starring Warren Beatty, which I actually couldn’t get through.)

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. Pasternak does something with chance, arbitrariness, and realism that is difficult for me to explain (maybe for a subsequent email). But if you can keep up with the dozens of Russian names (I ended up with six pages of hand-written notes), it's a great read (I went with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation).

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 beautiful edition from Persephone Books, 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, a search that involves a lot of bureaucracy and standing in line. (For a slightly more lighthearted exploration of Soviet line-waiting, if that’s possible, I also liked The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Sally Laird.)

Honorable mentions here 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 got 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 theory ideas I'd seen in the work of writers like Judith Butler. (If you're interested in Soviet feminism, try The Soviet Woman by Alexandra Kollontai. For a more modern, general look at women and war, try Twelve Feminist Lessons of War by Cynthia Enloe.)

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 be sure to include more women on my list, 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 manuscript of Doctor Zhivago from censors. This work also addresses the Jewish experience in post-war Soviet Union, as well as an refreshing perspective on disability, something I found 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 Ulitskaya’s 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 Fletch films, 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

Maybe it was my poor research abilities, but I struggled to find fiction set after the fall of the Soviet Union that looked interesting.

But here I will definitely mention three books I read before I started this project: Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina, a member of Pussy Riot, I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko, a collection of reportage from an incredibly brave woman, and I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart, all of which deal with the violence caused by the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As author James Ward hypothesizes, the reason that I, an American reader, can’t find any good Russian fiction after about 1999 may be because of Putin et. al.’s political stifling of writers and artists. The good news is that once the next "thaw" comes, we Westerners will (hopefully) get a few decades worth of new classics all within a few years. In the meantime, might check out To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans if I’m up for it!

Do you have any Russian favorites I may have missed?