Few literary canons inspire as much reverence, and fear, as Russia’s. The sheer size and complexity of novels like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) have created two groups of readers: Those who have read them, and those who say they will read them — one day.
For one reason or another, that day never seems to come. Allow us to make the case for why it should. Reading Russian literature is not only worth the effort, but is also far less arduous than many of us have been led to believe.
For this guide, Big Think reached out to Rosamund Bartlett, a cultural historian, translator, and author of many books, among them Tolstoy: A Russian Life (2011) and Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (2004). An honorary research fellow at Oxford, she discusses what makes Russian literature so special and shares her personal reading recommendations.
Art, life, and death
Like mountaineering or bug collecting, Russian literature usually isn’t something people get into casually. More often than not, what starts as an ordinary curiosity inevitably develops into a passion that stays with you for life. For Bartlett, the question of where and how that passion first originated prompts not one but several answers.
“Like so many readers,” she tells Big Think, “I was drawn to Russian writers by their unabashed interest in existential questions. Because of the oppressive political realities — Tsarist and then Soviet — their literary achievements were hard-won. After growing up in London, it was exhilarating to inhabit a world in which the arts, and literary works in particular, were of life-and-death importance.”
Her appreciation for Russian literature grew stronger through visits to Moscow and St. Petersburg, back when the latter was still called by its Communist name: Leningrad.
“In Soviet times,” she recalls, “both were highly atmospheric, unmodernized cities which largely preserved their 19th-century character and physiognomy.” Walking through streets where Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and more had walked before, she had “the dizzying sense” that one could “almost touch the past.”
Popular misconceptions
One of the biggest misconceptions about Russian literature — one joked about in TV shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, and Family Guy — is that it is needlessly tedious. This is not true — at least, not always.
“Tolstoy wrote his chapters like individual short stories,” Bartlett says. “It is hard not to be gripped by the immediacy of his narration. As Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita (1955), once memorably wrote: ‘When you read [Ivan] Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev; when you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop.”
Likewise, Russian literature is often thought to be uniformly dry and depressing, yet this too is greatly misleading. Though Russian writers can certainly make you deeply sad, many will also make you laugh out loud.
“A lot of it is serious, but you only need to read [Nikolai] Gogol’s surreal short story ‘The Nose’ or his novel Dead Souls (1842) to enjoy the richness of his satirical humor. Pushkin’s wit is apparent everywhere, and in [Ivan] Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov, the comic hero takes several chapters just to get out of bed,” Bartlett points out.
A final misconception about Russian literature is that it is like an island: disconnected from and counter to the literary traditions of European countries. While many writers may like to think that, Russian literature is, in fact, irrevocably connected to the West.
“Until Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703,” Bartlett explains, “there were no secular cultural traditions in Russia to speak of. The 18th century was therefore a period of intense assimilation of language, art, music, and literature from all over Europe, principally France, Italy, and Germany.”
Revolutionary telegrams
That’s not to say Russian literature doesn’t possess unique qualities. On the contrary, its preoccupation with European civilization, in many ways, served as the foundation of its originality.
“All the great 19th-century novels,” Bartlett says, “were preoccupied with matters of Russia’s national destiny and challenged Western convention when it came to genre. Russian writers arrived at the party late and variously struggled with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the weight of European tradition. [They] ultimately infused foreign forms with a creativity that made them utterly distinctive.”
Part of this distinctiveness is its aforementioned air of life-and-death importance: A quality rooted in both subject and style. “The critic John Bayley put it well when he described Western literature as being so ‘swaddled in the inertia of its accomplishment, the complacency of its prolongation,’ that even at its ‘most urgent’ it still sounds literary; by contrast, the critical dicta of the Russians seem like telegrams exchanged by revolutionaries after a coup d’état has begun, but before it is known whether it will succeed.’”
Because of a lack of political participation, literature in Russia was not just an art but a primary outlet for public discourse. As such, understanding the country’s history will help you understand its literary scene, and vice versa.
“It’s no coincidence that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev were all active and produced their best work around the same time,” Bartlett says. “Following the bleak and repressive years of Nicholas I, the spirit of optimism engendered by the Great Reforms introduced in the early years of Alexander II’s reign in the 1860s — including the abolition of serfdom — unleashed an unprecedented creative energy.”
Writers wrote not simply to entertain, but to diagnose societal problems and imagine possible futures: Endeavors that arguably reached their climax in the revolutions of 1917, when Russia transformed from a monarchy into a parliamentary republic and, subsequently, a communist dictatorship.
Golden Age?
When people speak of the Golden Age of Russian literature, they typically refer to a period stretching from the rise of Pushkin in the 1820s up to the deaths of Anton Chekhov and Tolstoy, who passed away in 1904 and 1910, respectively. It’s an alluring label and not entirely exaggerated given the enduring quality of the literary works produced in that period. But it’s also limiting and a little misleading.
For one, “Golden Age” suggests a homogeneity that does not accurately reflect how much the form and content of literary production in Russia changed from one decade to the next.
“After the deaths of Dostoevsky and Turgenev,” says Bartlett, “Tolstoy abandoned his vocation as a professional novelist to dedicate himself to religious and moral causes. Tsar Alexander III reacted to the violent circumstances of his reformatory father’s assassination with repressive measures, increasing censorship.” And while often grouped alongside the authors listed above, “Chekhov was from a younger generation and forged his career with short stories, befitting the era of so-called ‘small deeds’ rather than expansive novels.”
Moreover, the label steals the spotlight from other periods of Russian literary production that deserve our attention, too. “In the 1930s,” Bartlett notes, ”critics began referring to the fin-de-siècle revival of lyric poetry — the Symbolists and Acmeists — as the Silver Age. But were these poets really less valuable than those of the Golden Age?”
Unsung women authors
The international reputations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other male authors have also overshadowed the legacy of numerous women authors, whose work is now increasingly available in translation. “There’s Karolina Pavlova, author of A Double Life (1848), and the three Khvoshchinskaya sisters — the so-called Russian Brontës.” She also points to Aleksandr Alexandrov, author of The Cavalry Maiden (1836). Born female with the birth name Nadezhda Durova, he fought as a man in the Napoleonic Wars and is acknowledged as transgender by several contemporary scholars.
The plights and personalities of Russian women emerge to varying degrees through the writing of male authors. “The under-described female heroines in early to mid-19th century works by Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, [Mikhail] Lermontov, and others are often idealized and two-dimensional, while Tolstoy rejected philosopher John Stuart Mill’s call for equality between the sexes and wrote Anna Karenina (1878) partly to prove a woman’s place was in the home.”
Elsewhere, socialist writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) was a huge influence on subsequent generations of revolutionaries, including Vladimir Lenin. The story featured an active female protagonist who fiercely advocated gender equality. Later, the Soviet Union uplifted some women writers while silencing others.
“Anna Akhmatova, who became the undisputed queen of bohemian artistic circles of St. Petersburg in the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution, went on to lead a life of great courage and artistic integrity in the difficult Stalinist years, to which she bore triumphant witness in her celebrated Requiem (1965), a long narrative poem about the purges conceived while queueing outside a prison in Leningrad to hear news of her arrested son. She died in 1966, but Requiem could not be published in Russia until 1989, at the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost.”
Bartlett’s reading recommendations
To guide you into the vast, not always well-illuminated world of Russian literature, Bartlett recommends the following three books. While we encourage you to follow your own interests, we also present them by level of accessibility. Read them in order and at your comfort level, and you will be ready to keep exploring on your own.
Beginner: Chekhov’s short stories
“I’d suggest a volume of classic Chekhov short stories for their brevity, modern and simple language, and their mixture of humor with lightly worn meditations on the nature of existence. It is not for nothing that a range of authors, from Katherine Mansfield to Alice Munro, have viewed him as the greatest short story writer who has ever lived. Aided by his training as a doctor, Chekhov had superior powers in diagnosing the absurdity and tragedy of the human condition with extraordinary compassion, and understated stories such as ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ continue to enjoy worldwide appeal because of the universality and timelessness of their subject matter.
“As Raymond Carver once wrote, ‘Chekhov’s stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote — for few, if any, writers have ever done more — it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.’”
Intermediary: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
“Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a rich tapestry of a novel, which — like War and Peace — can and should be read several times at different stages of one’s life. If one is carried away by the passion of Anna and Vronsky’s illicit relationship during a first reading, the next time we might find ourselves thinking about the differences between romance and love, or becoming engrossed in Levin’s search for the meaning of life and his journey to self-knowledge.
“A deeper acquaintance with Anna Karenina might also stimulate us to think about how Tolstoy’s dissection of marital breakdown can be construed as a metaphor for the disintegration of Russian society as a whole post-Emancipation, leading to revolution. Alternatively, [it may] encourage us to ponder Tolstoy’s views on the impact of modern European technology, such as trains and modern agricultural equipment, on traditional Russian ways of life, or how the novel is, at another level, a profound examination of Russia’s vexed relationship with the West.”
Advanced: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
“Dostoevsky’s lengthy last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is perhaps not for the faint-hearted, which is reason enough to recommend it last. It represents the culmination of his remarkable journey as both writer and thinker, so it is best read after his other principal novels, and also his frequently overlooked Writer’s Diary (1873), which served as his creative laboratory. Completed during his last decade, this was a unique journalistic enterprise incorporating art and politics, non-fiction and fiction, in which Dostoevsky performed the roles of sole writer, editor, and publisher, and spoke directly to his readers about issues which preoccupied him.
“The overriding impression we gain from a first reading of The Brothers Karamazov is one of chaos and dissonance, but its complex, polyphonic text is richly rewarding and reveals an intricately organized structure. On the novel’s surface is the murder of a father and the struggles of his four sons. At its heart is a quest to affirm faith in God, reached through a succession of what Anatoly Lunacharsky termed ‘brilliantly staged dialogues.’ Are there some sins for which one cannot be redeemed? Can one subscribe to a faith which allows the suffering of children? These are some of the novel’s central questions.”
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