Russian literature Archives

Alexander Solzhenitsyn greatest works

November 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

introductory guidance notes

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008 ) was both the continuation of the nineteenth century Russian realist literary tradition, and the nearest the twentieth century had to a Tolstoy figure – a great writer who became a self-appointed conscience to the Russian nation. Solzhenitsyn survived four of the most severe tests known to human beings – war, cancer, unjust imprisonment, and exile. He made all of them the materials of his fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. This did not prevent him being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 under Brezhnev. He then lived in the United States until he was invited back to his homeland in 1994 following the collapse of communism.

Most of his work is written in a simple, spare manner in which ornamentation is stripped away in favour of moral purpose. The results celebrate a stoical, almost puritan heroism in the face of all that the Russian people have had to endure – constructed poverty, war, political corruption, censorship, and totalitarian repression.

In his later years, just like Tolstoy, he abandoned literature in favour of writing moralising polemical works concerned with religious and political issues, and he is generally regarded as having drifted into something of a reactionary. However, his earlier work is well worth serious consideration.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) is a short novel that made Solzhenitsyn famous overnight. It recounts a typical day’s work, deprivation, and suffering of a prisoner in one of Stalin’s labour camps. Publication was ‘allowed’ because it suited Krushchev in his post 1956 reforms and his criticism of Stalin. The facts of prison camp life were deliberately understated to meet the censor’s requirements. It catapulted Solzhenitsyn to fame, and yet within two or three years his work was banned all over again. Beginners should start here.
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The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978) could eventually turn out to be Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. It’s a three-volume encyclopedia of the forced labour camps which underpinned the communist system – from Lenin onwards. It was written in secret under incredibly difficult conditions and smuggled out to the West. It’s a history, a sociology, a complete political and social record of the labour camps. Rather unusually for Solzhenitsyn it is recounted via a series of poetic metaphors which hold together a wonderful collection of stories, statistics, and anecdotes. There are heartbreaking tales of endurance, survival, escape, and recapture. It is truly one of the great documents of historical witness. In retrospect it probably helped to bring about the collapse of the totally corrupt communist regime in the USSR. But most importantly it helps to document a tragically bleak period of quite recent European history. This is a work which could significantly affect your life.
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The First Circle (1968) is set in a special research-cum-detention centre reserved for mathematicians and scientists who are nevertheless political prisoners. This is what might be called a novel of ideas, as the characters discuss the political and historical forces which have brought them to their present unjust imprisonment. Of the main characters, one is eventually released, another is sent off to a much harsher regime, and the third remains where he is. Includes a satirical portrait of Stalin.

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August 1914 (1971) is the first part of a multi-volume epic, a historical novel on a grand scale about the origins of the Soviet Union and how communism came to take root there. The cycle is called The Red Wheel, and was never finished. Solzhenitsyn sees the Battle of Tannenberg at the start of the First World War as the first major turning point in this process. Using a range of modernist and vaguely experimental techniques, he sets in motion a huge cast of characters against the backdrop of this decisive battle.

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Lenin in Zurich (1976) is a short section from The Red Wheel which focuses largely on Lenin in exile, immediately prior to his triumphant return in a sealed train to St Petersburg’s Finland Station. It’s a very interesting study, because Solzhenitsyn is clearly critical of Lenin as one of the central architects of communism – yet he narrates the novel largely from Lenin’s point of view, blending a psychological character study and real historical detail with a witheringly ironic critique. Steeped in history, this is a major attempt at a political and psychological portrait of a historical figure.

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Mary

March 7, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Mary (1926) is Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel. It was written in Berlin and appeared as Mashenka under his pen name of V. Sirin, which he used to distinguish himself from his father – a writer and politician who was also called Vladimir Nabokov.

The novel was completely ignored at the time of its first publication – and yet it is a marvellous debut, full of subtle touches and an admirable restraint in telling three stories simultaneously. It is the tale of a first young love, an account of political exile, and the evocation of a dawning poetic imagination.

It is also full of what were to become the hallmarks of Nabokov’s mature literary style – verbal playfulness, ironic twists of story line, the juxtaposition of tenderness with the grotesque, and beautiful evocations of the textures of everyday life.

Mary – critical commentary

The love story

At its most obvious and superficial level, this is a story about a youthful love affair. Ganin is a sensitive teenage boy living on a country estate in Russia at the time of the First World War. He sees a pretty girl at an outdoor musical event and falls in love with her.

In the idyllic summer days that follow they meet in the countryside. His later memories of youthful rapture and erotic exploration are mingled with his sense of freedom and appreciation of the natural world of which he feels himself a part. The whole of this experience is summoned from memory whilst he is in exile.

In the autumn Ganin and Mary both return to St Petersburg and find their opportunities for privacy are severely curtailed. There is a brief attempt at consummating their romance – but it fails. The relationship then dwindles as they are forced apart – yet Ganin keeps the memory of it alive as a significant event in his life.

When Ganin sees Mary’s photograph as the wife of the vulgarian Alfyorov, it re-awakens these memories and fuels him with the desire to recapture his first true love. He detaches himself from his current mistress Lyudmila, and ignores the attentions of Klara, his busty neighbour in the Berlin pension. He plans to intercept Mary when she arrives at the station. But when she finally reaches Berlin to join her husband, Ganin suddenly realises that his perfect experience with Mary is a thing of the past:

As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the etherial sky he realised with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days – four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary … remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory. Other than that image no Mary existed, nor could exist.

Nabokov’s great skill here is in evoking the delicious nature of an early romantic experience, recollected in a later and dramatically different period which spells its doom. It is significant that Mary is never dramatised: she is only summoned via Ganin’s memories of their time together. He cannot go back to his lost love, just as he will never go back to his homeland.

Memory and epiphany

Ganin is in exile. He has left behind his native Russia and like other exiles he been cut off from the emotional comforts of his birthplace. But he is maintaining a fragile intellectual stability by two means. The first is by keeping ‘the past’ alive with active efforts of reminiscence. The other is by an equally vigorous effort in appreciating the current pleasures of the material world in which he finds himself.

These moments of appreciation are fleeting experiences of aesthetic and sensory pleasure. He notices the shifting moods and textures of the world around him. Surrounded by vulgarity and desperation, he rescues from it precious moments of insight.

The trajectory of exile

At its deepest level the novel is about emigration and exile, and in one sense the imagined character of Mary, Ganin’s first true love, acts as a metaphor for the loss of homeland. Ganin has grown up in the idyllic world of an aristocratic Russian country estate for which he has very deep feelings. These are mingled with his feelings for the young girl Mary.

But he is separated from both by his participation in the Civil War which follows the revolution of 1917-18. When he is injured and on the losing side, he is forced to flee the country he loves in order to survive. Hence his temporary presence in the seedy pension in Berlin – the ‘first’ centre of emigration.

He is surrounded by the other flotsam and jetsam thrown up by political upheavals in his mother country: the old poet Podtyagin, the crapulous Alfronov, and two homosexual ballet dancers. Podtyagin is stranded without a visa, waiting to travel on to the ‘second’ centre of emigration – Paris. But it seems likely that he will die from heart failure before he makes the journey.

Ganin also feels as if he must move on – but he chooses what was to become the most celebrated route for exiles within a decade of the novel’s publication in 1926. This route was into southern France and the Mediterranean ports, from which it was possible to continue the journey westwards. In this sense Nabokov accurately prophesied his own future.

Like many other exiles from the Stalinist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Nabokov was forced to travel from Berlin in Germany then on to Paris in France, and finally to the Mediterranean coast. Hoping for safe transport to a neutral country such as Portugal, he eventually went to America. There is a very well-documented account of this escape route, much of which was organised by the American ‘special agent’ Varian Fry.

Double time-scheme

The narrative also takes place on two separate chronological planes at the same time. Events in the pension unfold between Monday and Saturday of a single week. Saturday is the day when Ganin has decided to leave Berlin, and it is the day when Mary is due to arrive.

But Ganin’s recollections of his youthful love affair and the country he has lost go back over the previous ten years. This period spans his summer romance with Mary, their return to Saint Petersburg, the end of his schooling, and his participation in the Civil War and its aftermath.

These two chrolologies are woven together quite seamlessly and present the reader with an unbroken narrative flow. This is a very skillful control of narrative in such a young writer, as Nabokov was at the time of the novel’s composition.

Mary – study resources

Mary – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Mary – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Mashenka – Russian version – Amazon UK

Mashenka – Russian version – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Mary

first edition 1926

Mary – plot summary

1. Ganin is staying in a Russian-run boarding house in Berlin. A fellow guest Alfronov is expecting his wife to arrive from Russia.

2. Ganin is bored by his loveless affair with Lyudmila. He compares notes on life in exile with Alfronov.

3. An evocation of Berlin at night.

4. Ganin breaks off relations with Lyudmila, then wallows in the pleasure of reminiscences about Russia. He reconstructs the memory of recovering from typhus and forms the image of a girl. He reflects on the evanescence of even the most pleasant memories. Back at the pension he is caught by fellow guest Klara snooping in Alfronov’s desk, where he sees a photograph of his childhood sweetheart Mary, to whom Alfronov is now married.

5. Ganin and the old poet Podtyagin exchange reflections on memories.

6. Ganin recalls his first meeting with Mary and his first experiences of poetic epiphany.

7. He receives a letter from Lyudmila which he tears up and throws away without reading.

8. He lives in his memories of Russia and Mary, recalling their idyllic meetings in summer. His reveries are interrupted when his neighbour Podtyagin has a heart attack.

9. Next day Alfyonov receives a telegram confirming his wife’s arrival at the week end. Ganin recalls the last of his summer meetings with Mary. They both return to St Petersburg in the autumn. They try but fail to consummate the relationship. In the war years that follow, they gradually lose touch with each other.

10. Lyudmila sends a message of complaint, but Ganin prepares to leave Berlin at the week end.

11. Ganin helps Podtyagin to apply for an exit visa – which the old man leaves on a bus.

12. Podtyagin despairs of his lost passport.

13. Ganin packs his suitcases and reads old letters from Mary – written to him whilst serving during the Civil War in Yalta.

14. There is an unsuccessful party at the pension to celebrate Ganin’s departure.

15. Ganin recalls his retreat from the war. Wounded in the head, he sails to Constantinople. The party in. The pension degenerates badly.

16. Mary’s husband Alfyonov passes out in a drunken stupor. In the early morning Ganin takes leave of the poet Podtyagin.

17. Ganin goes to the station to meet Mary and rescue her from her appalling husband. But he suddenly realises that she is now a completed memory that he must leave behind. He takes a train instead, heading for France and the Mediterranean coast.

Mary – principal characters

Lev Glebovich Ganin	a young Russian exile in Berlin
Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov	the Russian husband of Mary
Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn	the landlady of the pension
Lyudmila Rubanski	Ganin’s lover in Berlin
Klara	a busty resident at the pension in love with Ganin
Anton Sergeyevich Podtyagin	an old popular Russian poet
Mary Alfyorov	Ganin’s youthful love, who never appears

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Mikhail Bulgakov – a guide

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

major works in English translation

Apart from the relatively straightforward and restrained Checkhovian style of his early work, A Country Doctor’s Notebook, most of Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing is characterised by a florid prose style, rich images, and startling metaphors. He also plays freely with science fiction, political allegory, and sudden shifts into the absurd.

You might keep in mind that almost all of what he wrote was either censored, banned, or simply not published in his own lifetime. Even though some of his work was popular when it appeared in the 1920s, his reputation as a major Russian writer has only been established since his writing has been gathered together and published in the post-1960s.

The Heart of a Dog (1925) A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific experiment by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A worryingly human animal is then turned on the loose, and the professor’s hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.

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Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel (1920s) When Maxudov’s bid to take his own life fails, he dramatises the novel whose failure provoked the suicide attempt. To the resentment of literary Moscow, his play is accepted by the legendary Independent Theatre and he plunges into a vortex of inflated egos. With each rehearsal more sparks fly and the chances of the play being performed recede. This is a back-stage novel and a brilliant satire on his ten-year love-hate relationship with Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts Theatre.
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A Country Doctor’s Notebook (1925) With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five year old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (and fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone practitioner in a vast country practice – in blizzards, pursued by wolves and on the eve of Revolution – is described in Bulgakov’s delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.
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The Fatal Eggs (1924) Professor Persikov discovers a new form of light ray whose effect is to accelerate growth in primitive organisms. But when this ray is shone on the wrong batch of eggs, the Professor finds himself both the unwilling creator of giant hybrids, and the focus of a merciless press campaign. For it seems the propaganda machine has turned its gaze on him, distorting his nature in the very way his ‘innocent’ tampering created the monster snakes and crocodiles that now terrorise the neighbourhood. An inspired work of science fiction and a biting political allegory.
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The Master and Margarita (1940/1973) is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, interspersed with chapters dealing with Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force. The novel is a multilayered critique of the Soviet society in general and its literary establishment specifically. It begins with Satan visiting Moscow in 1935, joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It then evolves into a whole scale indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Stalinist Russia. Banned but widely read, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov’s place among the pantheon of the greatest of Russian writers.
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Mikhail Bulgakov biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

life, works, political persecution

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891—1940) was born in Kiev in the Ukraine into a family of intellectuals. His father was a professor at the Theological Academy. From 1901 to 1904, Mikhail attended the First Kiev Gymnasium. The teachers of the Gymnasium exerted a great influence on the formation of Mikhail’s literary taste, and his favourite authors became Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dickens. He graduated as a doctor from Kiev University, specialising in venereology. In 1913 he married Tatyana Lappa, and moved into provincial villages, where he practised as an itinerant doctor. For a short time he became addicted to morphine, but his wife helped him kick the habit. During the revolution he was drafted by the White Army and worked as a field doctor, but then gave up medicine for literature. In his autobiography, Bulgakov recalls how he started writing : “Once in 1919 when I was travelling at night by train I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story”.

In 1921 he moved to Moscow and wrote for emigrée newspapers and worked for the literary department of the People’s Commissariat of Education. His journalism was also published in Berlin, which was the main centre for Russian emigration at the time. (Vladimir Nabokov lived and worked there at the same period.) In 1924 he divorced his first wife and married Liubov Evgenevna Belozerskaia. Bulgakov began writing the story about the Civil War in Ukraine in 1923, which he published in the journal Rossiia under the title The White Guard.

From 1925 onwards, Bulgakov was closely associated with the Moscow Arts Theatre, which was dominated by the figure of its founder Konstantin Stanislavsky and his theories of method acting. By 1928 he had three plays running in Moscow theatres, one of which — The Day of the Turbins — was a favourite of Stalin’s, even though it presented a sympathetic portrayal of White (counter-revolutionary) officers. Nevertheless, as Stalin’s reactionary grip on power tightened, Bulgakov’s work was increasingly criticised, and then banned. In 1929 he wrote a letter appealing for help to Maxim Gorky, who was in favour with the authorities:

All my plays have been banned; not a line of mine is being printed anywhere; I have no work ready, and not a kopeck of royalties is coming in from any source; not a single institution, not a single individual will reply to my applications…

He also wrote to the Soviet government requesting permission to emigrate, and as a result of this received a personal telephone call from Stalin. But he was never allowed out of the country, and never saw the rest of his family again. They had all settled in Paris – the ‘second’ centre of Russian emigration at that time.

Bulgakov began writing Master and Margarita in 1928, and the novel still shows some traces of its earliest drafts. But he burned the manuscript along with all his other works in progress in a Gogolian fit of despair in 1930. However, by 1933 he had resumed work on it.

In 1932 he married for the third time to Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaia. During the 1930s Bulgakov was employed as an assistant producer at the Moscow Arts Theatre, and he was also librettist and consultant at the Bolshoi Theatre. Stalin’s favour protected him from the worst of the arrests, torture, and executions which characterised the reign of terror at that time – but his works remained unpublished and banned.

In 1937 he diagnosed his own neurosclerosis and predicted that he would die in 1939. He was correct to within only three months. He spent the last years of his life working on what was to be his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.

Mikhail Bulgakov web links

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Mikhail Bulgakov at Mantex
Biography, study notes, and web links

The Master and Margarita
Stylish web site in English, Dutch, French, and Russian featuring all aspects of the novel, its themes and interpretation – plus multimedia links, including even pop video clips

Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
Web study featuring illustrations, maps, characters, themes, bibliography, and chapter notes with introductory essay and notes

Mikhail Afanasjevitch Bulgakov
Works, timeline, excerpts, links – in English, Russian & German

Bulgakov on Wikipedia
Life history, historical background, works, materials, and links

BBC Bulgakov Wiki
Biographical notes

Library of Congress Bibliography
Extensive records of biography, works, criticism, and commentary

The Heart of a Dog (1925) A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific experiment by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is then turned on the loose, and the professor’s hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.

The novel is a multilayered critique of the Soviet society in general and its literary establishment specifically. It begins with Satan visiting Moscow in 1935, joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It then evolves into a whole scale indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Stalinist Russia. Banned but widely read, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov’s place among the pantheon of the greatest of Russian writers.

Nineteenth Century Russian Novels

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

recommended reading from the classics

Russia has a rich literary tradition which stretches from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Its great writers have done particularly well with the novel, allowing themselves to be influenced by other strong traditions, such as the British and French.

Eugene Onegin (1831) Alexander Pushkin is generally considered to be the father of modern Russian literature – a witty, sophisticated writer. He was principally a poet, but his masterwork is in fact a novel – which is written in verse. It’s the story of a clever but bored aristocrat who charms a young woman Tatiana so much that she writes a letter declaring her love to him. He rejects her and continues with his bachelor existence. But years later, on meeting her again, he realises what he has missed. He asks for a second chance, but his time, despite the fact that she still loves him, it is she who rejects him. The novel exists in many translations, including the monumentally scholarly production by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s a wonderfully light and entertaining story, but with lots of hidden depths. Many critics argue that Tatiana represents the soul of Russia, simple and truthful, and Onegin the more sophisticated but ultimately inappropriate spirit of Europe.
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A Hero of Our Time (1839) Mikhail Lermontov is another one-novel writer who concentrated his attention, like Pushkin, on the theme of the ‘Superfluous Man’. This is the talented and educated young Russian who has no outlets for his skills and no place to employ his intelligence, because of the closed, feudal, and autocratic nature of Russian society. Lermontov was a contemporary of Pushkin’s, and like him he produced just this one substantial piece of fiction which seemed to sum up the epoch in which they lived. A Hero of Our Time turns on the events of a duel (which had killed Pushkin only ten years earlier). A young and disaffected soldier contemplates existential questions of will and identity, plus the perennial question of ‘how to live’. In the end he kidnaps a woman and shoots a man in a duel to test out the limits of his freedom.
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Dead Souls (1842) Nikolai Gogol is probably at his best in shorter fictions such as The Nose and The Overcoat. These are both seminal works in the history of Russian literature. He writes in an inventive and peculiar style, rich in playful and sometimes absurd imagery. He also has a habit of butting in to his own narratives to pass comments which sometimes have nothing to do with the story. Dead Souls is his one big novel. It’s a crazy satire on the corruption and inertia of nineteenth century provincial Russian life. The plot centres on someone who trades in the identities of peasants who have died but remain on the census records. Comic, absurd, and bitingly satirical, Gogol completed a sequel, but destroyed it in a fit of religious fanaticism whilst he was starving himself to death. This particular translation comes highly recommended. Vladimir Nabokov consigned all others to the rubbish bin.
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Notes from Underground (1864) Fyodor Dostoyevski represents the dark, tortured, and often violent side of Russian life. In his novels he explores all sorts of existential issues such as reason and free will, personal identity, guilt, religious belief, and the power of unconscious motivation. His treatment of these issues, the suspense in his plots, and his studies of tortured neurotic behaviour make him seem quite modern, and he is often included in studies of twentieth-century existentialism. Be prepared for complex plots, long meditations on philosophic issues, melodrama, and contradictions. The rewards are thrilling suspense and deep psychological studies of characters struggling with personal demons at the end of their behavioural tether. Notes from Underground is one of Dostoyevski’s classic existential meditations. A first person narrator informs us “I am a sick man…I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver” There is no plot: the character simply wrestles with his existence and debates whether to live according to reason or irrationality. You have the sense of something written in the middle of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth – and many modern writers make reference to this as a seminal work.
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The Gambler (1867) This famous novel was written under extreme pressure. Unless Dostoyevski delivered the manuscript within six weeks, all future royalties on anything he wrote would go to his unscrupulous publisher. So Dostoyevski hired a stenographer – the star pupil from Russia’s first school of shorthand dictation. He dictated the novel in four weeks – then married her. It’s a tight-knit, complex tale of compulsive gambling set in a German spa town. A young man Alexei vows that he will quit gambling as soon as he breaks even at the roulette wheel. He has also fallen in love with a beautiful young woman who does nothing but humiliate him. The novel sees the disintegration and paradoxically increased euphoria of Alexei’s character, until he is at the end so depraved that one wonders what keeps him from going mad.
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From the House of the Dead (1862) This isn’t a novel, but a documentary reportage. It gives an account of the ten years Dostoyevski spent in Siberian labour camps – as punishment for having planned to publish revolutionary pamphlets. The horrors of internment – including prisoners being flogged to death – are recounted in stomach-churning detail. But what emerges from the book as a whole is the amazing endurance of the human will and its desire to survive no matter how merciless the circumstances. If you have a taste for this topic, the book can profitably be read alongside similar classics such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
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Crime and Punishment (1866) This is one of Dostoyevski’s great masterpieces. Raskolnikov, a penniless student, decides to murder a greedy moneylender on principle in order to set himself outside and (as he sees it) above society. After he has done so, he is tormented by guilt and remorse. He is also pursued by a detective who seems to be able to read his mind, and to whom Raskolnikov repeatedly comes very close to confessing. In order to resolve his doubts about his own motivation and rationality, Raskolnikov in typical Dostoyevskian fashion decides to commit a second murder. This understandably makes matters worse. There is a great deal of conventional suspense – will he be found out, or not? – the outcome of which it would be unfair to reveal, but which is surprising nevertheless.
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The Brothers Karamazov (1880) This is another existential study which turns on the issue of a brutal murder. Old father Karamazov is killed by one of his three sons – but we don’t know which one. The eldest, Dmitri, is passionate, violent, and desperate for money; Ivan is an intellectual and an atheist; and Alyosha, the youngest, has love, faith, and compassion for everyone. (You don’t need a brass plaque on your door to see that these are aspects of Dostoyevski’s own personality.) Pay attention to the smallest details right from page one. This is a combination of a murder mystery, an exploration of the mind under extreme pressure, a study of the destructive nature of romantic love, and an argument for and against the existence of God. Many people regard this as Dostoyevski’s masterpiece.
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Anna Karennina (1875) Count Leo Tolstoy was a great novelist, but as a man he was full of contradictions. He was a pious Christian who did plenty of sinning; a rich land-owning aristocrat who was a passionate believer in the simple life; a compulsive gambler who believed in self-discipline; and an ascetic puritan who believed in sexual abstinence but who was a compulsive philanderer. As a social reformer, he might have been the man for whom the expression ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ was coined. Anna Karenina is the most approachable of his big novels. It’s the story of a beautiful woman torn between the man she loves and her duty to her husband and son. This story is counterpointed with that of Levin, a rich landowner who is seeking for the right way to live. He tries agriculture and politics, but ends up turning to God (not very convincingly). As the cultural philosopher Isaiah Berlin said of Tolstoy, his solutions are usually wrong; but what’s important is that he asks the right questions. However, it is the story of Anna’s love affair with Vronsky which dominates the novel and makes this an enduring masterpiece. This is the Russian equivalent of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and a highlight of the nineteenth-century novel.
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War and Peace (1863-9) As everyone knows, this is the archetypal nineteenth-century blockbuster. It is an epic study of birth, marriage, life and death set against the background of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the sacking of Moscow, and his tragic retreat in 1812. Tolstoy does a very good job of depicting war as a shambolic mess, and he is successful in undermining the idea that historical events are shaped by Great Men. It is a long novel. Be prepared for extended episodes featuring lectures on the philosophy of history. But the writing is crystal clear and the characters unforgettable.
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Fathers and Sons (1862) Ivan Turgenev was the first Russian writer to find success in Europe, and he spent most of his adult life there. He was a supporter of the Western solution to Russia’s problems. His work might seem rather lightweight compared to Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, but he touches on important Russian themes, and his novels are well composed and easy to read. Fathers and Sons looks at the conflict between generations. The older landowners wish to preserve traditional systems, whilst the younger generation are yearning for some form of revolution to free them from the dead hand of conservatism. Neither party wins out in the end, but it is to Turgenev’s credit that the novel presciently flags up political issues which were to erupt forty years later in Russian history. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World’s Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev’s working manuscript, which only came to light in 1988.
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Twentieth Century Russian Novels

More on literary studies
More on writing skills
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More on grammar

Russian Literature: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Russian poetry and prose 1800-2000

Catriona Kelly takes a rather unusual approach to the task of presenting two centuries of Russian literature without going for a chronological list or a ‘great writers’ structure. What she does instead is take Pushkin as a central starting point, then follows themes that arise from a consideration of his work and looks at other Russian writers en passant.

Starting from the importance of Pushkin to Russian society and culture, she puts nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature into a context which includes the political, social, and cultural history of a country which has gone from absolute monarchy, through totalitarian dictatorship, to a rough-hewn and precarious democracy in less than a hundred years. This book is not simply about literature: you’ll learn a lot about history from it too.

Her early chapters discuss Pushkin’s language and his thematic connections with other Russian writers as diverse as the poets Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and novelists Gogol, Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

There’s a thoughtful chapter on novels and poetry during the Soviet period, and she makes a brave attempt to re-examine literature from this dark era and defend it against accusations of crude propaganda.

She also looks at the role and significance of women in Russian literature – both as subjects and authors. Her observations seem to be based on a close acquaintance with ‘gender-aware criticism’ in the last years of the twentieth century, and there are cascades of new names in addition to those already well known, such as Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.

There are also chapters on religious belief and the nature of good and evil (plenty on Dostoyevsky there); Russia’s imperialistic relations with its neighbours and the cult of the exotic; and the writer as a guide to public morals.

This book could easily have as its alternative sub-title ‘An Introduction to Alexander Pushkin’, but taking him as her inspiration she considers just about every other major Russian writer of the last two hundred years – plus plenty more besides.

These very short introductions from OUP are an interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, maps, endnotes, suggestions for further reading.

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Catriona Kelly, Russian Literature: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.164. ISBN: 0192801449

Twentieth Century Russian Novels

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

recommended classic reading

St Petersburg (1916) Andrei Biely (pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) is a much-neglected figure from the period of modernist experimentation. He was a novelist, a poet, a theorist, and literary critic. His major work is a novel with a ticking bomb (concealed in a sardine can) at its centre – a sort of meditation on violence. It’s the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a never-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. Nikolai is pursued through the impenetrable Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. It is not unlike James Joyce’s Ulysses in its literary experimentation, and in being concerned with the events one day in one city. But the experimentation is of a different kind. Biely was a symbolist and a mystic. He uses his poetic style in this novel to bring the city to life as if it were a living, breathing being.
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We (1921) Yevgeny Zamyatin is also an unjustly neglected master of the school of experimental modernism which flourished in Russia until the early 1920s. His one novel is a very original science-fiction dystopia, and a satirical critique of the Russian revolution (which he had supported) as he saw it being betrayed by the forces of totalitarianism. It is a novel which deserves to be much better known. In a totally regulated society where people are known by numbers, two lovers embody irrational urges towards which the state is hostile. The novel was tragically prophetic of the Stalinism which was to come. It is written in a dazzlingly poetic and experimental style, and it was quite clearly the model for both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both of these writers had read the novel: this, the original, is far superior. Do yourself a favour: add this to your reading list.
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Mary (1923) Vladimir Nabokov is a great Russian writer, even though he left the country in flight from the revolution in his youth, and spent the rest of his life in exile, living in Germany, America, and Switzerland. In fact he wrote half of his huge output in English. He represents the playful, experimental side of modernism which the Stalinists did their best to stamp out. His writing is amazingly stylish – rich in imagery, erudite, stuffed full of verbal tricks and special effects.

Of course he is best known for Lolita, which he wrote in English whilst living in America. But he wrote novels in Russian during the 1920s and 1930s whilst living in Germany. He can be very lyrical as he is in his early novels Mary and Glory (1932) where he evokes the raptures of youthful pleasures, and the discovery of passion and loss. His lyrical prose records a young Russian exile’s recollections of his first love affair. But the woman in question clearly symbolises his relationship with Russia. He is also good at a creating a marvellous sense of awe in contemplating the quiet aesthetic pleasures in everyday events and special moments of being.

Other novels such as King, Queen, Knave show a much darker side to his nature, with its focus on adultery, deception, and cruelty. These traits are taken to an uncomfortable extreme in Laughter in the Dark (1932) which plots the downfall of a man who runs off with a young girl who, when he is rendered blind in a car accident, secretly moves her lover in to live under the same roof. The sleazy pair of them torment the protagonist in a particularly gruesome fashion. This theme of the older man driven to self-destruction by desire for a younger woman was something Nabokov explored again in The Enchanter which he wrote in Paris in 1939, and twenty years later in Lolita which he wrote in English whilst teaching in an American college.
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The Gift (1936) is generally held to be the greatest of Nabokov’s Russian novels. It deals with the ironies and agonies of exile. It’s also the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It’s also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative, and it also has at its centre a critique of Chernyshevsky. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write – a book very much like The Gift. The novel plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with conventional notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. It also includes a deeply felt fictionalisation of the murder of Nabokov’s own father in 1922 whilst he was attempting to stop a political assassination.
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The Master and Margarita (1940) Mikhail Bulgakov was originally a doctor. His early works The Diary of a Country Doctor and The White Guard are written in a lucid, plain style not unlike Chekhov (who was of course also a doctor). In the 1920s and 1930s Bulgakov turned to the theatre, and despite conflicts with the Stalinists at the height of their purges, he managed to survive just long enough to complete his masterpiece. The Master and Margarita is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, causing all sort of mischief and disruption. This is interspersed with chapters re-telling the story of Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force.
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Dr Zhivago (1957) Boris Pasternak is principally a poet so far as Russian literature is concerned, but it is his novel by which he is best known to the general reading public in the West. He was awarded the Nobel prize for it, but forced to turn it down by the Soviet authorities. This is a sprawling epic of the Russian revolution, a passionate love story, and a memorable portrait of a doctor-poet caught up in the wheels of history. Zhivago seeks to do good and live with simple dignity, but his efforts are thwarted by war, revolution, and his love affair with Lara, who is married to a Bolshevik general. Critical opinion has been somewhat divided over this work, with some readers seeing it as no more than a nineteenth century novel in disguise. With the general reading public however, it has never lost its appeal.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) This is the short novel that made Alexander Solzhenitsyn famous overnight. It recounts a typical day’s work, deprivation, and suffering of a prisoner in one of Stalin’s labour camps. Publication was ‘allowed’ as part of Krushchev’s post 1956 attack on Stalin and his legacy. The facts of the story were deliberately understated to meet the censor’s requirements at the time. It catapulted Solzhenitsyn to fame, and yet within a couple of years his work was banned again.

Solzhenitsyn writes in a simple, restrained style in which ornamentation is stripped away in favour of moral purpose. The results celebrate a stoical, almost puritan heroism in the face of all that the Russian people have had to endure – government-constructed poverty, war, political corruption, censorship, and totalitarian repression.

The First Circle (1968) This novel is set in a special research-cum-detention centre reserved for mathematicians and scientists who are nevertheless political prisoners. This is what might be called a novel of ideas, as the characters discuss the political and historical forces which have brought them to their present unjust imprisonment. Of the main characters, one is eventually released, another is sent off to a much harsher regime, and the third remains where he is. It is based very closely on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences of his first period of imprisonment by the Stalinist regime.
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August 1914 (1984) This is the first part of a multi-volume epic, a historical novel on a grand scale about the origins of the Soviet Union and how communism came to take root there. Solzhenitsyn sees the Battle of Tannenberg at the start of the First World War as the first major turning point in this process. Using a range of modernist-cum-experimental techniques, he sets in motion a huge cast of characters against the backdrop of this decisive battle. The whole enterprise was called The Red Wheel. There were further volumes in the cycle published, but towards the end of his life Solzhenitsyn transferred most of his energy into books arguing for social and political reform – rather in the same manner as Tolstoy.
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Lenin in Zurich (1976) This is a short novel composed of some separate chapters from The Red Wheel. It focuses largely on Lenin in exile, immediately prior to his triumphant return in a sealed train to St Petersburg’s Finland Station. It’s a very interesting study, because Solzhenitsyn is clearly critical of Lenin as one of the central architects of communism – yet he narrates the story largely from Lenin’s point of view. Steeped in history, this is a major attempt at a political and psychological portrait of a historical figure.
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Nineteenth Century Russian Novels

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introductory guidance notes

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Mary – critical commentary

Mary – study resources

Mary – plot summary

Mary – principal characters

major works in English translation

life, works, political persecution

recommended reading from the classics

Russian poetry and prose 1800-2000

recommended classic reading

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