read more weighty russian literature

I have Anna Karenina on my bookshelf. I bought it used. I have not opened it yet. I really want to, but I’m letting it go to waste because of fear. Sad, huh?

Then last night my professor referred to a quote from it that I recognized because it was famous, but I was angry I didn’t know the context and I couldn’t appreciate the joke.

Here sre some more suggestions:
Turgenev – First Love
Dostoyevsky – A gentle Creature and other stories
Gogol – The Overcoat
Checkov – The Kiss
(these are all super short in length, but heavy in weight, literary skill, and meaning.)
This is rich russian reading…not only 1000 page novels!

I got my hands on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate a while back. A true twentieth century War and Peace, it’s well worth reading, even though the socialist realist style of writing is a bit odd at times. The depiction of people struggling against totalitarianism is second-to-none, and it’s highly (and tragically) ironic that Grossman never saw the book published in his own struggle against the same.

i’ve now read War and Peace, Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), and Dead Souls (Gogol). I think I can say I’ve done this one, though I’d like to read Grossman’s Life and Fate at some point. Time for a break from weighty literature now, though – someone get me some light fiction!

Chekhov used to say that if a prisoner was not a philosopher who could get along equally well in all possible circumstances (or let us put it this way: who could retire into himself) then he could not but wish to escape and he ought to wish to.

He could not but wish to! That was the imperative of a free soul.

—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

And it’s about the Supreme Court! How could I not love it? Oh, Slate, I take back what I said about you losing credibility in your quest for all things faddish and popular.

“That scolding tone, those deliciously overwrought metaphors: It’s Catholic-school headmistress meets Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s the lively, unapologetically stylish Scalia that avid court-watchers know and love.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2145069

An entry, not about weighty Russian literature, but about my favourite Russian author, who also happens to be my favourite American author:) and his most notorious American novel. From Writers on writers in yesterday’s Guardian.

My curiosity was piqued – as whose might not be – by this “smut” about a dirty old man (38) seducing and kidnapping (to what unspeakable ends one could only hope) a mere infant (12). So I availed myself of a (French) copy of the book and settled down for a bad read. I was bitterly disappointed…for I found myself in the presence of a brilliantly written, violently funny, profoundly sad and highly moral novel whose true subject was that which had concerned both Proust and Chekov (to name but two authors out of hundreds). ~Edward Albee

Must reread Lolita soon.

Nabokov interviewed by the BBC in 1969. Quite forceful in his opinions:)

Pnin is going very quickly—I restarted it last night. So far I find the character Pnin incontrovertibly endearing.

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him to discover, upon his arrival to Cremona, that his lecture was not this Friday but the next. Actually, however, he not only arrived safely but was in time for dinner…”

I was actually thinking about this (granted, common) literary and life experience earlier yesterday. My life seems to be going very well now—ocassionally it’s even so well… so well orchestrated that I become suspicious. Summer 1999 was a very good time for me when I actually started to believe in luck. But also when things are going well in real life I begin to just wait for the tragedy. I know at some point the avalanche will drop, this time it will, and then it doesn’t. Even when things are going well it is still a reminder that you do not have control over your own life. I think I am in a time right now that I am open to reading stories and leading a life where the obvious good ending can actually happen and seem believable. I know Pnin can’t be happy, but this time I want him to be. I don’t want to be realistic.

I love Pnin’s Scotty.

after a long time slacking off on reading anna karenina, in the last two weeks or so I’ve been motoring along at quite a respectable pace, and i’m really enjoying it; an engaging and very comprehensive novel, which really comes alive in your mind.