Russian book club

[Cypress]

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The Brother Karamazov

“Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 1

“Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.” – Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov

“It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.” – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.” – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.” – Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

“I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked. What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases, or, finally, some other conception is substituted for patriotism – something which has nothing in common with the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer so severely.” – Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy

Thank you: Olga, Marina, Vera.

[Mott the Hoople]

Ahh Russian novelist...why say in 3 words what can be said in 30,000! ;)

[midcan5]

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like."

"Nevermind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.

"One picture, only one more, because it's so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities. I've forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men -- somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then -- who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they've earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbours as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys -- all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general's favourite hound. 'Why is my favourite dog lame?' He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog's paw. 'So you did it.' The general looked the child up and down. 'Take him.' He was taken -- taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It's a gloomy, cold, foggy, autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry.... 'Make him run,' commands the general. 'Run! run!' shout the dog-boys. The boy runs.... 'At him!' yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother's eyes!... I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of administering his estates. Well -- what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!

"To be shot," murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile.

"Bravo!" cried Ivan delighted. "If even you say so... You're a pretty monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!"

[Cypress]

Ahh Russian novelist...why say in 3 words what can be said in 30,000! ;)

For real!

I blame it on the long, dark, cold Russian winters. Being trapped indoors for eight months a year either turns one towards vodka.... or it gives one lots of time to think about the human condition. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were basically philosophers of a sort, and their massive tomes I believe give a false impression that Russian literature is by nature epic and vast. Anton Chekhov was, in fact, basically the inventor of the modern short story and writes in an economical, almost impressionistic way. Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others wrote many short stories which are quite good.

But I totally know what you mean. It took me about six months to finish Brothers Karamazov. And a couple weeks ago I almost picked up Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, but it took two hands to even lift it! I was so intimidated by the size, I ended up getting some comic books instead!

[christiefan915]

For real!

I blame it on the long, dark, cold Russian winters. Being trapped indoors for eight months a year either turns one towards vodka.... or it gives one lots of time to think about the human condition. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were basically philosophers of a sort, and their massive tomes I believe give a false impression that Russian literature is by nature epic and vast. Anton Chekhov was, in fact, basically the inventor of the modern short story and writes in an economical, almost impressionistic way. Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others wrote many short stories which are quite good.

But I totally know what you mean. It took me about six months to finish Brothers Karamazov. And a couple weeks ago I almost picked up Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, but it took two hands to even lift it! I was so intimidated by the size, I ended up getting some comic books instead!

Read Anna even if it takes months, it's well worth it. I read it going back and forth to work via public transportation and it did take a long time, but it's a great book... sad and depressing but great. Picture Vivien Leigh as Anna while you're reading. She was just so beautiful.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/7b/37/5c/7b375ca1c0675db6a77d03b1bb116ba3.jpg

[Cypress]

Read Anna even if it takes months, it's well worth it. I read it going back and forth to work via public transportation and it did take a long time, but it's a great book... sad and depressing but great. Picture Vivien Leigh as Anna while you're reading. She was just so beautiful.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/7b/37/5c/7b375ca1c0675db6a77d03b1bb116ba3.jpg

Thanks, it is on my bucket list, and I appreciate the recommendation.

Reading during the commute is the way to go.
I like to read on my lunch break at work. Almost every day. That is how I finished Dostoyevsky tome, and that's how I finished reading all six bloody books in the Harry Potter series (p.s. I should punch myself in the mouth for being such a geek).

[The Sage of Main Street]

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The Brother Karamazov

“Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 1

“Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.” – Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov

“It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.” – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.” – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.” – Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

“I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked. What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases, or, finally, some other conception is substituted for patriotism – something which has nothing in common with the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer so severely.” – Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy

Thank you: Olga, Marina, Vera.

Whimper and Wither

There must be something seriously wrong with all that superficial wisdom, because it was followed by totalitarian Communist tyranny.

[Mott the Hoople]

Whimper and Wither

There must be something seriously wrong with all that superficial wisdom, because it was followed by totalitarian Communist tyranny.
So you would disregard the great intellectuals of Germany of the 19th Century because Karl Marx was one of them and because Hitler followed? Seems pretty small minded to me.

[christiefan915]

Thanks, it is on my bucket list, and I appreciate the recommendation.

Reading during the commute is the way to go.
I like to read on my lunch break at work. Almost every day. That is how I finished Dostoyevsky tome, and that's how I finished reading all six bloody books in the Harry Potter series (p.s. I should punch myself in the mouth for being such a geek).

I read all the Harry Potter books and want to re-read them someday! Rowling's a genius IMO.

[Mott the Hoople]

I'm reading a book on leadership. There seems like there is something wrong with that.

[The Sage of Main Street]

So you would disregard the great intellectuals of Germany of the 19th Century because Karl Marx was one of them and because Hitler followed?
Karl Marx Was the Sex Slave of a Patty Hearst Type Duchess

It was a desperate, ignorant and aristocratic, preaching either academic Liberalism or religious Conservativism. To preserve its obsolete Birth-Class Supremacy after that failed, it had to try Communism or Fascism next. If you stubbornly refuse to hold your assigned heroes accountable, you won't count for much.

[Lightbringer]

So you would disregard the great intellectuals of Germany of the 19th Century because Karl Marx was one of them and because Hitler followed? Seems pretty small minded to me.

Marx was not a great intellectual.

[Cypress]

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like."

"Nevermind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.

"One picture, only one more, because it's so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities. I've forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men -- somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then -- who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they've earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbours as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys -- all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general's favourite hound. 'Why is my favourite dog lame?' He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog's paw. 'So you did it.' The general looked the child up and down. 'Take him.' He was taken -- taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It's a gloomy, cold, foggy, autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry.... 'Make him run,' commands the general. 'Run! run!' shout the dog-boys. The boy runs.... 'At him!' yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother's eyes!... I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of administering his estates. Well -- what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!

"To be shot," murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile.

"Bravo!" cried Ivan delighted. "If even you say so... You're a pretty monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!"

Thank you for that, Midcan. The "Grand Inquistor" chapter from Bothers Karamazov?? I have read from literary critics that chapter is among the most famous in world literature, and I cannot argue with them. I found it to be a remarkable and unique intellectual and philosophical piece on the nature of God, truth, and the nature of humanity. A style of prose and philosophy that is uniquely Dostoyevsky.

Here is another quote from Brothers Karamazov that is relevant to todays world. Why? Because this sounds like it was written about Donald J. Drumpf. It could even apply to a large contingent of JPP righty posters!


Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility…

[evince]

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The Brother Karamazov

“Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.” – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 1

“Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.” – Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov

“It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.” – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.” – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.” – Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

“I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked. What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases, or, finally, some other conception is substituted for patriotism – something which has nothing in common with the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer so severely.” – Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy

Thank you: Olga, Marina, Vera.







beautiful


thank you

[Cypress]

“Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.” ― Boris Leonidovich Pasternak , Doctor Zhivago

“I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics don't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth.” ― Boris Leonidovich Pasternak , Doctor Zhivago

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” ― Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

[Cypress]

Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" Still Strikes A Chord In Putin's Russia

In times of turmoil, Russians turn to their great writers for inspiration.

One of those writers is Mikhail Bulgakov, who died 75 years ago. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin liked some of Bulgakov's work, but he considered most of it too dangerous to publish. A museum in Moscow shows that the work is just as relevant as ever.

In the early 1920s, Bulgakov and his wife lived for several years in the rambling Art Nouveau building in central Moscow that now houses that museum. The couple made their home in Apartment 50, which the writer eventually turned into a key setting for his magical novel The Master and Margarita. The satire ridiculed much about Soviet life, and it wasn't published until 1967, 27 years after Bulgakov's death.

Since then, it's been reprinted in countless editions and made into plays and movies. One of the most popular is the serialized version, made for Russian television in 2005.
And its popularity endures.

There seem to be parallels everywhere between Bulgakov's Soviet characters and the functionaries of today's Russia, says Edythe Haber, an expert on Bulgakov at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

It's a very complicated novel, and people get what they want out of it," Haber says. "One thing that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the people of present-day Russia support is the Christianity that was attacked during the communist period. Those people who are very pro-church pick that out, whereas most readers look at the anti-authoritarianism of it."

Haber says that after all the years of repression, Bulgakov's work is now out in the world, and no amount of censorship can ever put it back.

In the novel, the devil pays a visit to the officially atheist Soviet Union, appearing as a well-dressed but somehow foreign-looking gentleman who introduces himself as Wolland, professor of black magic.

His first encounter is with a pair of writers who don't believe in him, and Wolland predicts — quite accurately — that one of them is about to lose his head in a freak encounter with a tram car.

continued
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/01/21/378633734/author-is-as-subversive-as-he-was-in-stalins-time

[Cypress]

Anytime my brain is assailed by an unintelligible Drumpf tweets, or by the incoherent message board musings of your typical barely-educated wingnut, I have to remind myself that there actually are humans capable of using language in a compelling, beautiful, and engaging way.

And such is the case with one of the books I am reading now. Nikolai Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”. A compilation of his early short stories centered around the folklore of Ukraine.

One knows they are in the presence of a great writer, when the first sentence of the story starts out like this:


“How intoxicating, how magnificent is a summer day in the Ukraine! How luxuriously warm it is when midday glitters in stillness and sultry heat, and the blue expanse of sky, arching like a voluptuous cupola, seems to be slumbering, bathed in languor, clasping the fair earth and holding it close in its ethereal embrace!”

- Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, The Fair at Sorochintsi (1831).


The Ukrainian Mystery of Nikolai Gogol

It is Christmas Eve and all sorts of mischief is afoot in Dikanka, a Ukrainian village made famous by Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol, the iconic 19th century writer reluctantly shared by Ukraine and Russia. As Dikanka’s cheerful denizens go caroling in the night, in one house a devil is cavorting with a local witch; in another, a sorcerer is magically sucking up dumplings. Enchanted, rowdy and mythical – this was Gogol’s Ukraine.

Born in Ukraine, made famous in Russia, Gogol embodies both the ties that bind the two countries and the differences that set them apart. As their relations deteriorated, the question of Gogol’s national affiliation repeatedly appeared on a list of matters disputed by Ukraine and Russia.

Reams of research have been dedicated to solving the puzzle of the writer, who straddled cultures and genres. A preeminent figure in Russian culture, the author of one of the masterpieces of Russian literature – Dead Souls – Gogol was also a dedicated panegyrist of his native Ukraine.

When he moved from Ukraine to St Petersburg at the age of 20, Gogol took his homeland and its legends with him. Audiences in Russia were mesmerized with his stories about Ukraine – heroic, mythical odes to the Ukrainian history and culture. In Gogol’s tales, the characters he borrowed from Ukrainian folklore make Faustian pacts with devil (Ivan Kupala Eve, 1831) or spend a blood-curdling night locked in a church with a vengeful witch (Viy,1835).

Yet, Gogol nevertheless became a quintessentially Russian writer, penning scathing satires of Imperial Russian society and casting a far-reaching influence on Russia’s literary tradition. “We all came out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” Fyodor Dostoyevsky reportedly one said.

Perhaps incongruously, Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination also drew inspiration from Gogol’s works, especially Taras Bulba, his ode to romantic nationalism. The novel follows exploits of a legendary warrior, a Cossack from the Zaporozhian Host, who puts patriotic ideals before paternal feelings.

“The Cossack history is the foundation of the Ukrainian national identity,” says Pavlo Mykhed, a doctor of philology at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature. “When Maidan [2014 Ukrainian revolution] happened, the Cossack past was brought back to life. [Rebels] gathered in sotnias [hundreds] and kurinis [several hundreds], just as it used to be in the Zaporozhian Host, and just as Gogol described it in Taras Bulba.”

The great writer himself had trouble answering the much-disputed question about his identity. “I don’t know whether my soul is Ukrainian or Russian. All I know is that I would never give preference to someone from Little Russia or to someone from Russia,” he wrote in 1844, with Little Russia being a term assigned to the Zaporozhian Host after its annexation by Muscovy.

More
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/81876

[evince]

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” ― Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn



ruining education

its been the republican plan for decades

[Cypress]

By "patriotism" is really meant a love for one's own nation above other nations; just as by "egoism" is meant a love for oneself more than for others. It is hard to imagine how such preference for one nation above others can be deemed a good, and therefore a desirable, disposition. If you say that patriotism is more pardonable in the oppressed than in the oppressor, just as a manifestation of egoism is more pardonable in a man who is being strangled than in one who is left in peace, then it is impossible to disagree with you; nevertheless, patriotism cannot change its nature, whether it is displayed in oppressor or oppressed. This disposition of preference for one nation over all others, like egoism, can in nowise be good.

But not only is patriotism a bad disposition, it is unreasonable in principle.

By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one's own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful. This belief is especially unreasonable in Christian nations.

It is unreasonable, not only because it runs counter to the first principles of Christ's teachings, but also because Christianity gains, by its own method, everything for which patriotism seeks; thus making patriotism superfluous, unnecessary, and a hindrance, like a lamp by daylight.

-- Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Patriotism and Christianity, 1896


“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”

-- Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago, 1957



“Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?”

-- Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov
.

[kflaux]

Long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with his heart-rending words, "Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?" In these moving words, other words resounded --"I am thy brother." And the young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath delicate, refined worldliness, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and noble.
--Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"


Hmm. Not a great translation...here is a much better one, by the husband-and-wife team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, perhaps the most capable translators of Russian literature into English:


And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?"--and in these penetrating words rang other words: "I am your brother." And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! even in a man the world regards as noble and honorable....

[Cypress]

Hmm. Not a great translation...here is a much better one, by the husband-and-wife team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, perhaps the most capable translators of Russian literature into English:

You are right, translation is everything. Prevear and Volokhonsky have proven themselves capable of excellent translations.

Gogol's "The Overcoat" is one of my favorite short stories (or novella?) in Russian literature, and established him as one of my favorite Russian writers. I believe I have read that Overcoat was the first time that a working class rube was treated in literary form as a real human being, a person worthy of dignity, rather than portrayed as a rube worthy of ridicule or pity. Gogol's prose I find to be quirky, strangely insightful, funny, sarcastic, and beautifully written all at the same time. I have yet to read "Dead Souls" but have it on my bucket list -- I am hoping Prevear-Volokhonsky did a translation!

As a testament to the monumental influence Gogol had on the legacy of Russian literature, Dostoyevsky is reputed to have said "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.

[kflaux]

You are right, translation is everything. Prevear and Volokhonsky have proven themselves capable of excellent translations.

Gogol's "The Overcoat" is one of my favorite short stories (or novella?) in Russian literature, and established him as one of my favorite Russian writers. I believe I have read that Overcoat was the first time that a working class rube was treated in literary form as a real human being, a person worthy of dignity, rather than portrayed as a rube worthy of ridicule or pity. Gogol's prose I find to be quirky, strangely insightful, funny, sarcastic, and beautifully written all at the same time. I have yet to read "Dead Souls" but have it on my bucket list -- I am hoping Prevear-Volokhonsky did a translation!

As a testament to the monumental influence Gogol had on the legacy of Russian literature, Dostoyevsky is reputed to have said "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.
Indeed. The Overcoat is sui generis.

You know you really are in terra incognita, when you find yourself reading a ghost story in which the ghost is probably the most believable character......

You might get hold of Vladimir Nabokov's Notes on Russian Literature, if you haven't already, and read what he writes about The Overcoat. Very illuminating.

...only, if you are a Dostoyevsky fan, as I am too, you might want to avoid what Nabokov has to say about FD....especially his The Idiot....which, however, is hilarious, but you will never be able to take that work seriously again...........

[Cypress]

Indeed. The Overcoat is sui generis.

You know you really are in terra incognita, when you find yourself reading a ghost story in which the ghost is probably the most believable character......

You might get hold of Vladimir Nabokov's Notes on Russian Literature, if you haven't already, and read what he writes about The Overcoat. Very illuminating.

...only, if you are a Dostoyevsky fan, as I am too, you might want to avoid what Nabokov has to say about FD....especially his The Idiot....which, however, is hilarious, but you will never be able to take that work seriously again...........


Thanks for the insights.

I really like Dostoyevksy, and it would be a bummer if somebody convinces me to hate him!



“You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman...
'You never can tell...' he answered.
'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!!”

Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita":

[kflaux]

Thanks for the insights.

I really like Dostoyevksy, and it would be a bummer if somebody convinces me to hate him!


“You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman...
'You never can tell...' he answered.
'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!!”

Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita"

Well I'll be damned. I don't remember that passage.

Russian language and literature is a hobby of mine, so to speak, and about three years ago I decided that I needed to read Bulgakov's classic, in the original.

Took me six months IIRC....but if I forgot a passage like that, well......

BTW and as you are probably aware, The Master and Margarita has been made into several movies and TV series.

They all have their defenders, and I cannot say definitively which is best, but I own the DVDs of and thoroughly enjoy this version:

https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Aleksandr-Abdulov/dp/B000EANSXM/ref=sr_1_1

The phrase "Manuscripts don't burn!" on the DVD sleeve is what any Russian will remember as the catch-phrase of the book....and it is especially significant given that Bulgakov's manuscript itself didn't burn....it was kept in total secrecy by his widow until Stalin was safely dead and buried, and the partial cultural thaw under Khrushchev allowed for most (but not all) of it to be published.

Ironically, in the book and the movies, it is the Devil himself (Wolland) who utters the famous "Manuscripts don't burn"....referring of course to the manuscript of the Master....

[kflaux]

Ah. I see I have been preaching to the choir. Mea Culpa. I just read your post #16 above.

One really striking thing about TMaM in my opinion is the juxtaposition of scenes from...not the Bible, nothing in the Bible is anywhere near that explicit....from the last few days of Christ, up to and including his crucifixion...with scenes from 1930's Moscow, in which the latter necessarily come off as superficial, absurd, ludicrous.

Anyways. A novel that is like no other.

[RickyTavy]

Ah. I see I have been preaching to the choir. Mea Culpa. I just read your post #16 above.

One really striking thing about TMaM in my opinion is the juxtaposition of scenes from...not the Bible, nothing in the Bible is anywhere near that explicit....from the last few days of Christ, up to and including his crucifixion...with scenes from 1930's Moscow, in which the latter necessarily come off as superficial, absurd, ludicrous.

Anyways. A novel that is like no other.

I'm sure you could have had this pleasant exchange with the Ant, if only you'd taken the time to put it all in words of two syllables or less, elitist assholes.

[Cypress]

Well I'll be damned. I don't remember that passage.

Russian language and literature is a hobby of mine, so to speak, and about three years ago I decided that I needed to read Bulgakov's classic, in the original.

Took me six months IIRC....but if I forgot a passage like that, well......

BTW and as you are probably aware, The Master and Margarita has been made into several movies and TV series.

They all have their defenders, and I cannot say definitively which is best, but I own the DVDs of and thoroughly enjoy this version:

https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Aleksandr-Abdulov/dp/B000EANSXM/ref=sr_1_1

The phrase "Manuscripts don't burn!" on the DVD sleeve is what any Russian will remember as the catch-phrase of the book....and it is especially significant given that Bulgakov's manuscript itself didn't burn....it was kept in total secrecy by his widow until Stalin was safely dead and buried, and the partial cultural thaw under Khrushchev allowed for most (but not all) of it to be published.

Ironically, in the book and the movies, it is the Devil himself (Wolland) who utters the famous "Manuscripts don't burn"....referring of course to the manuscript of the Master....

Much obliged for the recommendations.

Reputedly, Rolling Stones classic "Sympathy for the Devil" was inspired by Jagger's reading of Master and Margarita (Although I personally attribute it more to acid and weed).

Speaking of the body of work by translators Prevear and Volokonsky, I recently finished reading their "Selected Stories" by Anton Chekhov. If you have not given it a gander, you may want to consider! Personally love Chekhov's economical, impressionistic style of prose, which also tends to being strangely and beautifully poignant.

[kflaux]

Much obliged for the recommendations.

Reputedly, Rolling Stones classic "Sympathy for the Devil" was inspired by Jagger's reading of Master and Margarita (Although I personally attribute it more to acid and weed).

Speaking of the body of work by translators Prevear and Volokonsky, I recently finished reading their "Selected Stories" by Anton Chekhov. If you have not given it a gander, you may want to consider! Personally love Chekhov's economical, impressionistic style of prose, which also tends to being strangely and beautifully poignant.

Thanks for the recommendation. I recently read an extended article on P&V, explaining that she, as a native Russian, renders a work in rough English, he goes through and makes it more natural and faithful in tone, idiom etc, she goes over his version, and they bounce it back and forth until they're both satisfied.

Chekhov probably ranks as my favorite author, if "favorite" is measured by the amount of time actually spent reading the author. ...if by actual page count, it would prolly be Faulkner....

....I was an American studying physics in Tokyo when I learned that two papers directly related to my research were written in Russian, with no translations anywhere. So I began studying Russian, taking classes given in Japanese, which may not have been too smart.... Anyways, about a year into those classes, the Bolshoi Theater visited Tokyo, and so our teacher got us tickets for their performance of Uncle Vanya, and told us to read the play in advance of the performance. Which was absurd...we were nowhere near able to read at that level after just one year of study. IAC perhaps partly for that reason, it became my favorite play in the Chekhov canon, and I have on DVD the performance with Michael Redgrave, Lawrence Olivier, Joan Plowright, and a young, radiant and truly beautiful Rosemary Harris as Elena......

[Cypress]

Thanks for the recommendation. I recently read an extended article on P&V, explaining that she, as a native Russian, renders a work in rough English, he goes through and makes it more natural and faithful in tone, idiom etc, she goes over his version, and they bounce it back and forth until they're both satisfied.

Chekhov probably ranks as my favorite author, if "favorite" is measured by the amount of time actually spent reading the author. ...if by actual page count, it would prolly be Faulkner....

....I was an American studying physics in Tokyo when I learned that two papers directly related to my research were written in Russian, with no translations anywhere. So I began studying Russian, taking classes given in Japanese, which may not have been too smart.... Anyways, about a year into those classes, the Bolshoi Theater visited Tokyo, and so our teacher got us tickets for their performance of Uncle Vanya, and told us to read the play in advance of the performance. Which was absurd...we were nowhere near able to read at that level after just one year of study. IAC perhaps partly for that reason, it became my favorite play in the Chekhov canon, and I have on DVD the performance with Michael Redgrave, Lawrence Olivier, Joan Plowright, and a young, radiant and truly beautiful Rosemary Harris as Elena......

Great stuff. I salute you. I seemingly cannot get many native born Americans in my circle of influence interested in the great Russian works, although one lady at the office read Brothers Karamazov with me. Probably shouldn't have started with Dostoyevsky, who is as much a philosopher and a psychologist as he is a story teller.

My "introduction" to Russian literature were Russian children's books. Which my father - a Russian immigrant - would read to us. I must have only been about three years old, but the residual memory of my father's voice and the pictures from "Mukha-Tsokotukha" are still burned onto the neurons of my mind.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51U8c502aTL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

My Russian language skills have atrophied since childhood, but I remember my father's book collection; dusty old editions Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gogol, Paustovsky. Being far beyond my Russian linguistic abilities, these books forever lay beyond my reach. But, at the dawn of the second half of my life, I got a second wind and started tracking down good English translations of the Russian masters. Right now, I am finishing up some Gogol, with Bulgakov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev on deck. Wish me luck!

[kflaux]

Great stuff. I salute you. I seemingly cannot get many native born Americans in my circle of influence interested in the great Russian works, although one lady at the office read Brothers Karamazov with me. Probably shouldn't have started with Dostoyevsky, who is as much a philosopher and a psychologist as he is a story teller.

My "introduction" to Russian literature were Russian children's books. Which my father - a Russian immigrant - would read to us. I must have only been about three years old, but the residual memory of my father's voice and the pictures from "Mukha-Tsokotukha" are still burned onto the neurons of my mind.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51U8c502aTL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

My Russian language skills have atrophied since childhood, but I remember my father's book collection; dusty old editions Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gogol, Paustovsky. Being far beyond my Russian linguistic abilities, these books forever lay beyond my reach. But, at the dawn of the second half of my life, I got a second wind and started tracking down good English translations of the Russian masters. Right now, I am finishing up some Gogol, with Bulgakov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev on deck. Wish me luck!
Excellent. I salute you, and your father.

It's never too late to learn, though. The great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss took up Russian in his late 60's, IIRC, partly in order to be able to correspond with Nikolai Lobachevsky, a co-discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry.

[Cypress]

Excellent. I salute you, and your father.

It's never too late to learn, though. The great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss took up Russian in his late 60's, IIRC, partly in order to be able to correspond with Nikolai Lobachevsky, a co-discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry.

Great point. I have been making it a point to improve my atrophied Russian by conversing with my Russian relatives here in North America, and leveraging my trips to Belarus.

To follow up on this tangent, those 18th and 19th century scientists strike me as renaissance men and women in every sense of the word. I just read a book about Alexander Humboldt, and his breadth and scope of knowledge seems astonishing, simply beyond comprehension. To this day, when I read classic scientific papers from the 19th century, I am struck by how well-spoken and literate they were, and how keen their powers of observation were in the absence of the technology we have readily at hand.

[Cancel 2018.1]

Read Anna even if it takes months, it's well worth it. I read it going back and forth to work via public transportation and it did take a long time, but it's a great book... sad and depressing but great. Picture Vivien Leigh as Anna while you're reading. She was just so beautiful.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/7b/37/5c/7b375ca1c0675db6a77d03b1bb116ba3.jpgAlmost finished with Anna. Any suggestions as to what movie version does the most justice to it? Just rented the latest version with Jude Law. Seems to concentrate on visually artistic, stylish aspect which gets in the way of the storyline.

[kflaux]

Great point. I have been making it a point to improve my atrophied Russian by conversing with my Russian relatives here in North America, and leveraging my trips to Belarus.

To follow up on this tangent, those 18th and 19th century scientists strike me as renaissance men and women in every sense of the word. I just read a book about Alexander Humboldt, and his breadth and scope of knowledge seems astonishing, simply beyond comprehension. To this day, when I read classic scientific papers from the 19th century, I am struck by how well-spoken and literate they were, and how keen their powers of observation were in the absence of the technology we have readily at hand.
Do you travel to Belarus on business? Yes, it's great if you have opportunities to use the language.

I have a half-Russian sister-in-law, but I almost never see her....

Not many people read classic scientific papers from long ago. Are you a student of the history of science? As it happens, I did a master's in history and philosophy of science at Univ. Toronto.

If need be, we could take this discussion to a new thread....

[kflaux]

Almost finished with Anna. Any suggestions as to what movie version does the most justice to it? Just rented the latest version with Jude Law. Seems to concentrate on visually artistic, stylish aspect which gets in the way of the storyline.

I have no opinion on movie versions--have not seen one yet--but one of the most remarkable parts of the book, for me, was the passage describing her mind during her final trip from home. Starting with where she sees herself in the mirror and doesn't recognize herself.

It seems to me that Tolstoy brilliantly described the psychological implosion of a human mind. Not that I'm an expert on e.g. madness or the like, but it rang true to me.

And, of course, the scene in which Levin proposes to Kitty (...the second time!) is wonderful...and much else besides......

[Cypress]

Do you travel to Belarus on business? Yes, it's great if you have opportunities to use the language.

I have a half-Russian sister-in-law, but I almost never see her....

Not many people read classic scientific papers from long ago. Are you a student of the history of science? As it happens, I did a master's in history and philosophy of science at Univ. Toronto.

If need be, we could take this discussion to a new thread....

Not business. Family is from Belarus, and cousins throughout Belarus and Russia. The only thing I dread is the constant vodka drinking, I am a lightweight! I am afraid I am not putting in a good showing for Uncle Sam with my vodka soaked Slavic relatives.

Re: your background -- Holy smoke, check out the brain on kflaux! Impressive. That is the kind of scholarly endeavor I can respect. Parents I know are always telling their kids to major in engineering, computer science, or something that supposedly makes a lot of money. My advice? Study what you like, and what interests you as long as you feel you can excel in it.

My career involves a scientific research, and it just so happens that in the course of literature review I sometimes run across old scientific papers, and my curiosity leads me sometimes back into the earlymost 20th century and late 19th century. Interesting stuff, someday I would like to take a gander at Darwin's original published work!

Regarding the question on movies, I cannot stand movies made by americans and british that purport to be an adaptation of a great Russian novel. The Americans and the Brits just don't get it right, they do not understand the nuance and the intangibles of the Russian soul. Which gets back to your earlier comment about translation. A translation from the original Russian has to be authentic and culturally relevant. Which is why I appreciated your comment on the Prevear-Volokonsky translation team which bring both the native Russian and the native English speaker perspectives to the work.

[Cancel 2018.1]

I have no opinion on movie versions--have not seen one yet--but one of the most remarkable parts of the book, for me, was the passage describing her mind during her final trip from home. Starting with where she sees herself in the mirror and doesn't recognize herself.

It seems to me that Tolstoy brilliantly described the psychological implosion of a human mind. .
I felt like that was a result of an addiction to morphine which she was using to help with sleep.

[Cancel 2018.1]

Regarding the question on movies, I cannot stand movies made by americans and british that purport to be an adaptation of a great Russian novel. The Americans and the Brits just don't get it right, they do not understand the nuance and the intangibles of the Russian soul.
To be fair, how often does a movie do justice to any book?

[kflaux]

Not business. Family is from Belarus, and cousins throughout Belarus and Russia. The only thing I dread is the constant vodka drinking, I am a lightweight! I am afraid I am not putting in a good showing for Uncle Sam with my vodka soaked Slavic relatives.
Aha. I can relate, to an extent. My wife is Japanese, and on trips to Japan, sake and etc. are part of every meal with friends. Sometimes it's not something I'm real keen on--I must be getting old--but as in Russia, it's part of the culture.


My career involves a scientific research, and it just so happens that in the course of literature review I sometimes run across old scientific papers, and my curiosity leads me sometimes back into the earlymost 20th century and late 19th century. Interesting stuff, someday I would like to take a gander at Darwin's original published work!
His Origin is an interesting read. He did a very good job of gradually making the malleability of species something people could accept, by talking about e.g. pigeon breeding and the like.

Most of what I did was in history of physics and math, however. Master's dissertation on Faraday's discovery of E-M induction.


Regarding the question on movies, I cannot stand movies made by americans and british that purport to be an adaptation of a great Russian novel. The Americans and the Brits just don't get it right, they do not understand the nuance and the intangibles of the Russian soul. Which gets back to your earlier comment about translation. A translation from the original Russian has to be authentic and culturally relevant. Which is why I appreciated your comment on the Prevear-Volokonsky translation team which bring both the native Russian and the native English speaker perspectives to the work.
I guess they are both translations, so to speak, aren't they. And any "translation" of a book into a movie will be imperfect, in the same way that there is no such thing as a perfect translation into another language. "To translate is to traduce".

[Phantasmal]

Aha. I can related, to an extent. My wife is Japanese, and on trips to Japan, sake and etc. are part of every meal with friends. Sometimes it's not something I'm real keen on--I must be getting old--but as in Russia, it's part of the culture.


His Origin is an interesting read. He did a very good job of gradually making the malleability of species something people could accept, by talking about e.g. pigeon breeding and the like.

Most of what I did was in history of physics and math, however. Master's dissertation on Faraday's discovery of E-M induction.


I guess they are both translations, so to speak, aren't they. And any "translation" of a book into a movie will be imperfect, in the same way that there is no such thing as a perfect translation into another language. "To translate is to traduce".
Japan, a country I would suffer a plane ride to visit. I am fascinated by their culture.

[kflaux]

To be fair, how often does a movie do justice to any book?
True dat. Some are tolerable. Many are not.

A very few however rise above their textual origins, transcend them. My favorite example of this is Rashomon, the film that first got Akira Kurosawa noticed. Based on two interesting but not widely known or appreciated short stories by R. Akutagawa.

[blackvegetable]

Ahh Russian novelist...why say in 3 words what can be said in 30,000! ;)

unlike Dickens, they weren't paid by the word.....and if you can't hack the long books, try Turgenev or the grossly underappreciated Lermontov

[blackvegetable]

Ahh Russian novelist...why say in 3 words what can be said in 30,000! ;)

Ever see an unabridged copy of The Recognitions?

Now take a peek at the font......

[blackvegetable]

For real!

I blame it on the long, dark, cold Russian winters. Being trapped indoors for eight months a year either turns one towards vodka.... or it gives one lots of time to think about the human condition. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were basically philosophers of a sort, and their massive tomes I believe give a false impression that Russian literature is by nature epic and vast. Anton Chekhov was, in fact, basically the inventor of the modern short story and writes in an economical, almost impressionistic way. Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others wrote many short stories which are quite good.

But I totally know what you mean. It took me about six months to finish Brothers Karamazov. And a couple weeks ago I almost picked up Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, but it took two hands to even lift it! I was so intimidated by the size, I ended up getting some comic books instead!


If you are gonna go BIG, there are far more enjoyable options than Tolstoy.....

The Sot Weed Factor for one.....and it is a f...ing riot....not to mention, a great primer on pre-revolutionary American history....

[blackvegetable]

Read Anna even if it takes months, it's well worth it. I read it going back and forth to work via public transportation and it did take a long time, but it's a great book... sad and depressing but great. Picture Vivien Leigh as Anna while you're reading. She was just so beautiful.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/7b/37/5c/7b375ca1c0675db6a77d03b1bb116ba3.jpg

but so sadly troubled....she almost didn't get the Scarlett role because her boobs were too small for US audiences......but they fixed that by bolstering them with tape....

[blackvegetable]

Thanks, it is on my bucket list, and I appreciate the recommendation.

Reading during the commute is the way to go.
I like to read on my lunch break at work. Almost every day. That is how I finished Dostoyevsky tome, and that's how I finished reading all six bloody books in the Harry Potter series (p.s. I should punch myself in the mouth for being such a geek).


You can floss away the Potter with some Philip Pullman.......that shit is awesome....in an exchange with a Yale/Chicago lit PhD, she named him as her fave...I had no idea who he was.

[blackvegetable]

Whimper and Wither

There must be something seriously wrong with all that superficial wisdom, because it was followed by totalitarian Communist tyranny.

Dostoevsky, who was nearly executed as a "Decembrist", recovered to become a Lapdog of Reaction....spent his final years as the Rich Lowry of his generation.

[blackvegetable]

Thank you for that, Midcan. The "Grand Inquistor" chapter from Bothers Karamazov?? I have read from literary critics that chapter is among the most famous in world literature, and I cannot argue with them. I found it to be a remarkable and unique intellectual and philosophical piece on the nature of God, truth, and the nature of humanity. A style of prose and philosophy that is uniquely Dostoyevsky.

Here is another quote from Brothers Karamazov that is relevant to todays world. Why? Because this sounds like it was written about Donald J. Drumpf. It could even apply to a large contingent of JPP righty posters!

I had an elderly professor in college, Victor Terras, who had translated at least one of Dostoevsky's notebooks....

[blackvegetable]

Thanks for the insights.

I really like Dostoyevksy, and it would be a bummer if somebody convinces me to hate him!

love his work, but the man was a bit of a shit.....

[blackvegetable]

True dat. Some are tolerable. Many are not.

A very few however rise above their textual origins, transcend them. My favorite example of this is Rashomon, the film that first got Akira Kurosawa noticed. Based on two interesting but not widely known or appreciated short stories by R. Akutagawa.

The best I recall is Silence of the Lambs.....Harris is actually a very accomplished writer - Red Dragon is a MUST read.

[kflaux]

Great to see you here, BV


If you are gonna go BIG, there are far more enjoyable options than Tolstoy.....
We may have had this conversation somewhere else, but....

...granted the de gustibus aspect, one objective reason to read Tolstoy is for the unflinching honesty.

Thus in W&P, it is obvious from e.g. his depiction of the Battle of Borodino that Tolstoy hates warfare, sees it as a stupid and pointless waste of lives. But he is also perceptive enough to see that it also has its positive aspects, e.g. in character formation, and he is too honest to omit this. So Pierre is finally able to achieve discipline and self-respect largely, it is suggested, through his soul-searing experiences after Borodino.

That, the epic sweep, and the fully-formed characters, who are never less than three-dimensional, and always, always believable, are powerful reasons to read him IMO....


The Sot Weed Factor for one.....and it is a f...ing riot....not to mention, a great primer on pre-revolutionary American history....
Had not heard of this, I will give it a look, thanks

Concur with what you say about Lermontov as well

[Owl'd You're Up!]

You might get hold of Vladimir Nabokov's Notes on Russian Literature, if you haven't already, and read what he writes about The Overcoat. Very illuminating.

I looked for that, found nothing. Did you mean "Lectures on Russian Literature (https://archive.org/stream/VladimirNabokovLecturesOnRussianLiterature/Vladimir_Nabokov_Lectures_on_Russian_LiteratureBoo kFi.org_djvu.txt)"?

[kflaux]

I looked for that, found nothing. Did you mean "Lectures on Russian Literature (https://archive.org/stream/VladimirNabokovLecturesOnRussianLiterature/Vladimir_Nabokov_Lectures_on_Russian_LiteratureBoo kFi.org_djvu.txt)"?
That's it, yes. Mea culpa.

Again, if you like Dostoyevsky, your fondness for him may take a hit.

However, you in particular will I'm sure be very interested in what he has to say about the art of translation. Many of his examples are English-French, IIRC, and where he discusses translation into and from Russian, he provides clear explanations that require no knowledge of the language.

[Owl'd You're Up!]

That's it, yes. Mea culpa.

Again, if you like Dostoyevsky, your fondness for him may take a hit.

However, you in particular will I'm sure be very interested in what he has to say about the art of translation. Many of his examples are English-French, IIRC, and where he discusses translation into and from Russian, he provides clear explanations that require no knowledge of the language.

No problem.

I am rather ambiguous about Dostoyevsky, and am hoping to find an explanation why that is.

Oh, and... I discovered I find it very, very hard to translate English into another language. Funny how that goes, once two realms governed by different languages are established, with next to no interaction between the two. So, I'll have to see whether the Lectures are pertinent.

[Cypress]

Dostoevsky, who was nearly executed as a "Decembrist", recovered to become a Lapdog of Reaction....spent his final years as the Rich Lowry of his generation.

Did not know about his Rich Lowry years. Evidently, Tolstoy went a bit off the rails in his latter years, apparently considering himself some kind of Christian spiritualist.

It was 150 years ago, and there is so much cultural and historical filter between us, and Russia of the late 19th century, I tend to not think about it too much, unless circumstances in their personal lives informed their writing. As was the case with Dostoyevsky's years in the Siberian penal colonies. The published letters he wrote while in Siberia are riveting.

The limited amount I have read about Anton Chekov leads me to presume he was generally a very decent human being, charitable, egalitarian, and a fiercely honest. But he knew he was going to be dead before he reached 50, so perhaps that influenced his almost manic commitment to accomplishing great things.

[blackvegetable]

Great to see you here, BV


We may have had this conversation somewhere else, but....

...granted the de gustibus aspect, one objective reason to read Tolstoy is for the unflinching honesty.

Thus in W&P, it is obvious from e.g. his depiction of the Battle of Borodino that Tolstoy hates warfare, sees it as a stupid and pointless waste of lives. But he is also perceptive enough to see that it also has its positive aspects, e.g. in character formation, and he is too honest to omit this. So Pierre is finally able to achieve discipline and self-respect largely, it is suggested, through his soul-searing experiences after Borodino.

That, the epic sweep, and the fully-formed characters, who are never less than three-dimensional, and always, always believable, are powerful reasons to read him IMO....


Had not heard of this, I will give it a look, thanks

Concur with what you say about Lermontov as well

thanks for having me, and for helping Cypress keep this service to humanity going......just don't let Owl'd know you saw me here - I've worked too hard to burnish my image as a Visigoth.

[blackvegetable]

Did not know about his Rich Lowry years. Evidently, Tolstoy went a bit off the rails in his latter years, apparently considering himself some kind of Christian spiritualist.

It was 150 years ago, and there is so much cultural and historical filter between us, and Russia of the late 19th century, I tend to not think about it too much, unless circumstances in their personal lives informed their writing. As was the case with Dostoyevsky's years in the Siberian penal colonies. The published letters he wrote while in Siberia are riveting.

The limited amount I have read about Anton Chekov leads me to presume he was generally a very decent human being, charitable, egalitarian, and a fiercely honest. But he knew he was going to be dead before he reached 50, so perhaps that influenced his almost manic commitment to accomplishing great things.

It was something he called "Diary of a Writer"....he was my hero in high school, and then I decided to get to know him better in college......he really was a bit of a hoser....

[kflaux]

Oh, and... I discovered I find it very, very hard to translate English into another language. Funny how that goes, once two realms governed by different languages are established, with next to no interaction between the two. So, I'll have to see whether the Lectures are pertinent.

It is something of a truism among translators that a high degree of facility in two different languages does not by any means automatically mean that one is capable of a high level of translation. Translation skills have to be acquired separately, and the particular skills involved will typically depend heavily on the language pair.

[kflaux]

The limited amount I have read about Anton Chekov leads me to presume he was generally a very decent human being, charitable, egalitarian, and a fiercely honest. But he knew he was going to be dead before he reached 50, so perhaps that influenced his almost manic commitment to accomplishing great things.

He was also quite modest. When asked how long he expected he would continue to be read after his death, IIRC, he replied "seven years. Isn't that about the shelf life for a writer like me?" --paraphrasing of course.

He also had a nice sense of humor, honed during his first few years of writing, when journals would demand humorous very short tales that could be fit onto a single page.

In one letter of his, sent from his new estate in the country to his brother, a fire marshall: "When you come to visit, we will hold a fire drill in your honor"

[Cypress]

He was also quite modest. When asked how long he expected he would continue to be read after his death, IIRC, he replied "seven years. Isn't that about the shelf life for a writer like me?" --paraphrasing of course.

He also had a nice sense of humor, honed during his first few years of writing, when journals would demand humorous very short tales that could be fit onto a single page.

In one letter of his, sent from his new estate in the country to his brother, a fire marshall: "When you come to visit, we will hold a fire drill in your honor"

Great stuff, and you have some good insights.

Modesty indeed. Descended from serfs, he apparently never had the aristocratic bearing of a noble-born Tolstoy. I think he even kind of annoyed Tolstoy with his modesty. Chekov was always more the observer, the scientist - in stark contrast to Tolstoy the philosopher and spiritualist. I think that is part of what I like about Chekov.

More than any other Russian writer I have read, Chekov really seemed to capture the soul of Russia, from the lowliest peasant, to the intelligentsia and nobility. There is an authenticity and frankness that is remarkable.

The other thing that is admirable about Chekhov is that he was outraged by injustice. I have only read in a cursory way about the trip he took to the Sakhalin penal camps, but apparently he helped publicize the inhumanity of the penal camps in a series of letters that were published. I am going to study that a little more.

[Cypress]

How Chekhov Remembered the Forgotten: Sakhalin Island


“Gazing at the opposite shore, I feel that if I were a convict, I would escape immediately, whatever the consequences.”
-Anton Chekhov, The Island of Sakhalin, 1895

In 1890 it was not a geographical location Chekhov was trying to flee, so much as a social and literary ennui that had overtaken him. Despite success in his medical training and his writing career (he had been unanimously voted the Pushkin Prize winner two years prior), Chekhov felt the sort of listlessness that only travel or all-consuming work can cure. Chekhov chose both, undertaking a formidable journey from his comfortable home and highly active social sphere in Moscow across the Siberian wilderness to the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island. Intending to write a book that would make up for his partial abandonment of his medical practice (he always made himself available to treat peasants’ ailments, accepting little or no compensation), Chekhov aimed to survey every settlement and prison on Sakhalin Island. In crafting his own escape, he chose to pursue the stories of those for whom there was no escape. Chekhov was 30 years old.

The voyage would not be without difficulties. Chekhov was of delicate health since his youth; Payne reports that Chekhov spit blood both just prior to and during the three-month journey to Sakhalin. Family and friends urged Chekhov to delay or cancel his journey altogether, but the writer would not be deterred. While Chekhov was steadfast in what he felt was an obligation to uncover the truth about the convicts on Sakhalin Island, he recognized the dangers that lay ahead. Writing to his friend and publisher A. S. Suvorin, Chekhov advised him that “‘in case I’m drowned or anything of that sort, you might keep in mind that all I have or may have in the future belongs to my sister; she will pay my debts.”

In a last-ditch effort to persuade his friend not to travel to the penal colony, Suvorin wrote to Chekhov that his work would be in vain, that Chekhov’s readership did not care for information on a bunch of murderers running about their island prison. Chekhov response was as follows:


“‘Though the trip may be nonsense – stubbornness, a whim – consider the matter and tell me what I have to lose by going? […] For example, you write that Sakhalin is of no use or interest to anybody. Is that really so? Sakhalin is useless and uninteresting only to a society that does not exile thousands of people to it and spend millions to maintain it […] From the books I’ve read and am reading, it is clear that we have sent millions of people to rot in prison, we have let them rot casually, barbarously, without giving it a thought; we have driven people in chains, through the cold thousands of miles, have infected them with syphilis, made them depraved, multiplied criminals, and we have thrust the blame on red-nosed prison officials. Now, all educated Europe knows that the officials are not to blame, but rather all of us; yet this has nothing to do with us, it is not interesting? […]

No, I assure you, Sakhalin is of use, and it is interesting; and I regret only that it is I who am going there and not someone else who knows more about the business and would be more capable of arousing public interest'”

Considering the lawlessness of the place, one might think that there were no authority figures, but this was not so. Throughout his life Chekhov abhorred the widespread malfeasance amongst minor Russian bureaucrats, and this is a central theme in many of his short stories prior to and after his journey to Sakhalin Island. Prison guards and administrators made up a significant portion of the Sakhalin Island population, but most were either corrupt, disorganized, dimwitted, or all of the above. Chekhov noted widespread abuses of authority, including slave labour. One prison warden had eight servants, all unpaid. Despite the illegality of the use of convicts as servants in Siberia, this restriction was ignored “in the most flagrant manner”. On an even larger scale of servitude, convicts in the Dué prison were put to work for*a St. Petersburg-owned company. Prisoners choked in poorly ventilated coal mines while the private Russian company made absolutely no attempt to recompense the penal colony for their efforts. Many free settlers were hired with pay to work in the coal mines, but even they had to work in worse conditions than the prisoners (Chekhov 104-107). On a daily basis prisoners bribed guards to get out of their work, and when they could not or would not pay their keepers they were beaten instead.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/3c/9d/f8/3c9df83cd8926a5ae85ab37c3919042f--anton-chekhov-story-writer.jpg

Full article at
https://gatewayinstrument.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/how-chekhov-remembered-the-forgotten-sakhalin-island/

[Cypress]

Without socialism, bourgeois practices and the egotistical principle of private ownership gave rise to the "people of the abyss" described by Jack London and earlier by Engels.

Only the competition with socialism and the pressure of the working class made possible the social progress of the twentieth century and, all the more, will insure the now inevitable process of rapprochement of the two systems. It took socialism to raise the meaning of labor to the heights of a moral feat. Before the advent of socialism, national egotism gave rise to colonial oppression, nationalism, and racism. By now it has become clear that victory is on the side of the humanistic, international approach.

The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew. Under the present conditions this would be tantamount to the suicide of mankind. Socialism should ennoble that ground by its example and other indirect forms of pressure and then merge with it.

- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov


Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressures of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.

The reader will understand that ideological collaboration cannot apply to those fanatical, sectarian, and extremist ideologies that reject all possibility of rapprochement, discussion, and compromise, for example, the ideologies of fascist, racist, militaristic, and Maoist demagogy.

Millions of people throughout the world are striving to put an end to poverty. They despise oppression, dogmatism, and demagogy (and their more extreme manifestations — racism, fascism, Stalinism, and Maoism). They believe in progress based on the use, under conditions of social justice and intellectual freedom, of all the positive experience accumulated by mankind.

- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
.

[Cypress]

My good companion Yuri Petrovich held Sakharov in the highest esteem. Sakharov - an intellectual, an humanist, admired for his fierce integrity, unbounded empathy, and sterling moral conscience. Basically, everything that Donald J. Drumpf isn't.


Civilization is imperiled by: a universal thermonuclear war, catastrophic hunger for most of mankind, stupefaction from the narcotic of "mass culture," and bureaucratized dogmatism, a spreading of mass myths that put entire peoples and continents under the power of cruel and treacherous demagogues, and destruction or degeneration from the unforeseeable consequences of swift changes in the conditions of life on our planet.

In the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime. Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressures of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.

-- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov

[Micawber]

Gotta read notes and crim and punishment. Neither long.

The fur hat... funny

Death of Ivan ilych ....

[Cypress]

Gotta read notes and crim and punishment. Neither long.

The fur hat... funny

Death of Ivan ilych ....

I need to circle back and read "Notes"....but not until I have finished my Deadpool comic books!


Arguably one of the greatest novelists in history, Fyodor Dostoevsky is especially notable for interweaving deep philosophical, psychological and theological threads into his brilliant fiction. As a result, his works become much more than stimulating, entertaining stories but actual representation of 19th century intellectual history. This can not be any more true for his most philosophical work of all, Notes from Underground. Notes is Dostoevsky's groundbreaking philosophical prologue to his later novels, and it wrestles with modern existential questions which deal with Man's role in a world where the idea of God was being rejected more and more.

The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries espoused the value of reason, proclaimed the potential improvement of Man and Society, and freed humanity from superstition. By the 19th century, with the belief in God declining, Dostoevsky saw mankind having lost its moral bearing, wafting directionless in the tempest that is life. Instead of liberating Man for the better, the Enlightenment had renounced his spiritual connection. Where Dostoevsky saw a creature of God, his contemporary philosophers were seeking a new definition of modern man, out from under the definition of God.

"Notes from the Underground" provides a greater perspective in European thought. The 19th century was the characterized by a brutal polarization of existential thinking in which there was no synthesis. Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche epitomize this philosophical schism: at one end, Dostoevsky calls for Man to embrace faith and Christian morality; at the other stands Nietzsche, rejecting religion as unnatural and entreating Man to transgress contemporary moral values. By the turn of the century, Man and God were still as much a mystery as before, and so remain.

In Notes, Dostoevsky shows us the Underground Man, a despicable and pitiable creature who betrays himself and is not even aware of it. He is the creation of a thoroughly anti-modern author imploring his fellow Russians to resign from the West.

http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/novels/UGMan/ugman.html



Can Dostoevsky Still Kick You in the Gut?
The New Yorker - Book Reviews
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-dostoevsky-still-kick-you-in-the-gut

[Cypress]

"People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad." -- Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

[drgafan]

Gotta read notes and crim and punishment. Neither long.

The fur hat... funny

Death of Ivan ilych ....

Yes, the masterpiece from Leo Tolstoi

[drgafan]

love his work, but the man was a bit of a shit.....

What made you think so :)

[drgafan]

I have no opinion on movie versions--have not seen one yet--but one of the most remarkable parts of the book, for me, was the passage describing her mind during her final trip from home. Starting with where she sees herself in the mirror and doesn't recognize herself.

It seems to me that Tolstoy brilliantly described the psychological implosion of a human mind. Not that I'm an expert on e.g. madness or the like, but it rang true to me.

And, of course, the scene in which Levin proposes to Kitty (...the second time!) is wonderful...and much else besides......

I like that scene too (although seen better versions, i.e. in a recent Anna Karenina musical)

[drgafan]

I lived a mere walk away from that building - there was always something mysterious about that building!

[drgafan]

Great remarks!

[Cypress]

I am reading "Gulag Archipelago" and here are some quotes I like

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice. ” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


https://www.justplainpolitics.com/showthread.php?95445-fyi-about-me&p=2369489#post2369489

[Cypress]

My contribution to improving the internet.
This forum could probably benefit from having more Solzhenitsyn, and less Republican racism.


“What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary - property and position - all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.” 

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

[Cypress]

My latest donation to improve the tenor of jpp.com, also known by its alternate name “Stormfront II"

Isaac Babel 1894-1940

Arrested by NKVD agents on 15 May 1939, and subsequently executed, his common law wife Antonina Pirozhkova wrote: We drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.


Isaac Babel, the Writer Stalin Wanted Us to Forget

July 13th, 2017 will be Isaac Babel’s 123rd birthday. It seems important to remember it not just because Babel is one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, but also because the Stalinist regime, which executed him at the age of 45, tried to utterly obliterate his memory.

His name was removed from literary who’s whos and encyclopaedias. He disappeared from school and university syllabuses. The films whose screenplays he’d worked on no longer showed his name in the credits. Even to mention him in public was a risk. None of it worked. Babel is perhaps more famous now than at any time since his death, partly thanks to Peter Constantine’s wonderful translation of his Complete Works, and partly thanks to the many contemporary authors who have acknowledged a debt to Babel’s writing.

<<snip>>

On May 15th 1939, Babel was arrested and taken to Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison. Under torture he confessed to espionage. On January 16th the following year, in the early hours of the morning, he was tried in the private chambers of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s security chief. Babel retracted his confession, but he was sentenced to death anyway. At 1:40 the next morning he was shot, and his body thrown into a mass grave. His last recorded words are a plea: “Let me finish my work.”

Full article https://www.bookwitty.com/text/remember-isaac-babel-the-writer-stalin-wanted-us/5963675050cef73f3fd2cccc

[Cypress]

I'm, gonna have to give grudging respect to a culture in which stadiums get filled up with people wanting to hear poetry readings.


When Poets Rocked Russia’s Stadiums

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, Russian poetry has begun to resemble American poetry in ways that are both fascinating and sad. What’s sad is how little they are read, and how little they matter. Whatever reach contemporary poetry had in Russian society has vanished like wood smoke.

The death on Tuesday of Andrei Voznesensky, a stirring poet of the post-Stalin “thaw era” in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused many to recall a time when that reach was enormous. Voznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds. A moment presented itself — the relative artistic freedom of the early Khrushchev era — and these poets pounced on the microphone. As Mr. Voznesensky put it, with a punk lip curl: “The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.”

The poets of the thaw era were liberating figures, and have frequently been likened to the West’s most word-drunk rockers and singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. They were political, sexy, a bit louche and sometimes ridiculous. They squabbled. Mr. Yevtushenko seemed to be alluding to poets too, when he asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

The attention paid to Mr. Voznesensky’s death is a reminder not just of that ecstatic thaw era, but of how important Russia’s poetry has been over three centuries, from Aleksandr Pushkin to Anna Akhmatova, to the country’s sense of itself. It is a vast and elusive country, one that poetry — that pointed words — helped to unite. Pushkin (1799-1837) is the rebellious founder of modern Russian literature, and the country’s greatest early poet, its Shakespeare: all roads snake back to him. He had a cultivated voice that nonetheless caught the Russian vernacular, and he continues to be adored there. Among Pushkin’s qualities was a suspicion of power and corruption that would fortify his successors and help see them through the darkest hours.

Full article https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/books/03poets.html

[SkinnyTS]

Dostoyevsky is the best Russian author ever! His characters are so alive and real

[Cypress]

This book involves two of my favorite entertainment genres - a post-apocalyptic dystopian future -- and video gaming!



Metro 2033
Dmitry Glukhovsky

Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It is set in the Moscow Metro, where the last survivors hide after a global nuclear holocaust.

In 2013, a nuclear war occurred, forcing a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to underground metro stations in search of refuge. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the communist "Red Line" faction and the fascist "Fourth Reich", to the more powerful factions such as "Polis", which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the "Hanza" regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033

Video Game inspired by book...
Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by 4A Games. The story is based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel of the same name, and is set in the ruins of Moscow following a nuclear war, where the survivors are forced to live in underground metro tunnels. Players control Artyom, a man who must save his home station from the dangers lurking within the Metro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(video_game)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc2hhef-Nzo

[Cypress]

How Tolstoy Can Save Putin’s Soul

If Putin preferred Tolstoy over Dostoevsky, what a happier, more peaceful place Ukraine would be right now

The drama being played out right now in Russia and Ukraine isn’t merely geopolitical. It’s a deep-seated drama of the national soul that’s been around for centuries. And Russian literature is the place we see it in full flower. You see, the question Vladimir Putin is grappling with is the one that recurs throughout the 19th century Russian classics: What is the source of our national greatness?

In approaching this question, Putin, whose two favorite writers happen to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, has two distinct traditions to choose from: Dostoevsky’s belief in Russian exceptionalism or Tolstoy’s belief in the universality of all human experience, regardless of one’s nationality, culture, or religion. Alas, he has chosen Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy.

Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm. This messianic vision stemmed from the fact that Dostoevsky thought Russia was the most spiritually developed of all the nations, a nation destined to unite and lead the others.

This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others. Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture. One of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning was his capacity to uncover the full-blooded truth of each one of his characters, no matter their nationality.
continued at
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tolstoy-can-save-putins-soul

[Guno צְבִי]

One of the best novels I have read

Cement (Russian: Цемент) is a Russian novel by Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958). Published in 1925, the book is arguably the first in Soviet Socialist Realist literature to depict the struggles of post-Revolutionary reconstruction in the Soviet Union

[Cypress]

This is on my nightstand, and next on deck for me to read.


Solzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the Soviet labour camp system - it is now regarded as one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

"It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech..."


https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894

[Cypress]

Evidently, this is the most viewed thread in this subforum….

This lady is reputedly one of the most popular and respected Russian authors today, I have have got "The Big Green Tent" on my reading list - it is evidently a portrayal of the Soviet dissidents of the 1950s and 60s, and an indictment of the totalitarian Soviet regime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/books/review/the-big-green-tent-by-ludmila-ulitskaya.html


Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin

Lyudmila Ulitskaya does not like to draw attention to herself. In person, she is unassuming and softly spoken, a 68-year-old grandmother with grey cropped hair and small, elegant hands. She does not consider herself exceptional. But this modest, self-effacing individual is one of Russia's foremost contemporary novelists and a leading advocate for freedom of expression. She started writing almost by accident after she was sacked from her job as a geneticist in the 1960s and accused of dissident activity by the former Soviet authorities. "I thought, quite wrongly, that scientists were freer [than artists]," she has written in the past. "Of course, all these illusions were shattered over time."

"I'm not afraid," Ulitskaya insists, speaking through a translator. "Compared to the Stalinist era, our government now is a pussycat with soft paws … Having said that, I believe that (Russian liberal democratic reformer) Khodorkovsky is in jail because the whole society was so scared that no one stood up for his defence. There were threats: the court was afraid, the witnesses, the judge, because no one had the courage to speak up and that saddens me. That loss of dignity frustrates me because our society had only just started overcoming its fear after so many years of oppressive rule. The Russian people have once again started to be gripped by fear."

"In Russia, there is a drastic gap between rich and poor, to the extent that I feel the country is on the brink of civil war. The salary of a civil servant can be hundreds of thousands less than that of a businessman. It causes huge irritation, especially when people show off their wealth, with all their furs and bling. I hope that the next generation will be educated more to spend their money wisely and charitably. And, for me, the first person to realise he should act like this was Khodorkovsky."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/17/lyudmila-ulitskaya-dissident-putin-interview

[Cypress]

It basically has everything I like - a dystopian, apocalyptic future, survival horror, the Mad Max of the underground.


Metro 2034 (The sequel to Metro 2033)
by Dmitry Glukhovsky

Overview
The long-awaited sequel to the cult bestseller Metro 2033, the second volume in the Metro trilogy, Metro 2034 continues the story of survival and struggle that unfolds in the mazes of the Moscow subway after WWIII.

As the entire civilization was wiped out by atomic bombs and the surface of the planet is polluted with neclear fallout, the only place suitable for men to live are shelters and bunkers, the largest of which is the subway system of Moscow, aka the Metro.

The Metro Series is set following a nuclear war in the early 21st century. The remnants of humanity now live underground in the Moscow subway system. Like the city-states of ancient Greece, individual stations govern themselves sometimes banding together to form small nations. Their ideologies vary from adherence to the Koran to fascism to nonspecific mysticism to communism. They war among each other, and with the mutant beings which have risen from ashes of the old world.

Metro 2034 takes place roughly a year after the events of Metro 2033. For better or worse, the “threat” of the dark ones has been eliminated. Those who remain must live with the decisions they made and that is not necessarily easy to do.

There's no hope for humans to return to the surface of Earth, to repopulate the forsaken cities, and to become once again the masters of the world they used to be. So they rebuild a strange and grotesque civilization in the tunnels and at the stations of the subway. Stations become city-states that wage trade and war on each other. A fragile equilibrium is established.

And then all can be ruined in matter of days. A new horrible threat looms that can eradicate the remains of humanity and end our era. It would take three unlikely heroes to face this menace.

The basis of two bestselling computer games Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, the Metro books have put Dmitry Glukhovsky in the vanguard of Russian speculative fiction.

Metro 2034 tells a previously unknown part of the greater Metro saga that some only know from video games. Featuring blistering action, vivid and tough characters, claustrophobic tension and dark satire the Metro books have become bestsellers across the world.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/metro-2034-dmitry-glukhovsky/1118588634
https://horrornovelreviews.com/2016/01/11/dmitry-glukhovsky-metro-2034-review/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r-wvv1yzDo

[Cypress]

This I recently reserved at the library.

Life and Fate
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving an account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature (New York Review Books classics. summary).


Grossman’s 'Life and Fate' took me three weeks to read – and three to recover

There are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own. After a lifetime of reading you become formed by books; you are partly an accumulation of others’ ideas. Every time I re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I see how this brief but enormously influential novel, first read in my teens, created in me the sense of lightness and excitement when walking down a London street, or how the phrase “among the cabbages” would resonate as a fragment of a sentence about memory and longing.

But only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003. Like a handful of other people a decade ago, I felt that I held a samizdat; no one else I knew had ever heard of it.

Like many of my generation, I’d been shaped by ideas; by a number of -isms, socialism and feminism above all. I saw the world in terms of various us and them groupings. After reading Life and Fate they seemed to matter less. Grossman wasn’t advocating Christian saintliness, and was far from perfect in his own life. But if, even in the horror of war, you can alleviate suffering through some extraordinary action (volunteering to go to the gas chamber to hold the hand of a child so he won’t have to die alone), how easy might it be to behave with less anger, cynicism, irritation or sneery dismissiveness? And that’s what I have tried to do. Life and Fate is a daunting undertaking, but for those who finish it the experience is profound. Few novels that set out to change the world succeed; this one merely changed me.

continued https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/26/a-book-that-changed-me-linda-grant-vasily-grossman

[Cypress]

I thoroughly enjoyed the "Metro" series by this author, and was also interested to find out he is a dedicated Russian liberal activist bent on sticking it to Putin. Always worth it to hear from actual Russians who have lived their whole lives in Russia, rather than message board arm chair experts.

Here is a pretty powerful indictment of American conservatives' favorite world leader: Vladimir Putin. There are actually a lot of parallels with Trumpism...


Interview: Dmitry Glukhovsky on the ‘Dubious Reality’ of Putin’s Russia

In today’s Russia, ‘one single government-corporation rules and owns the country,’ says Dmitry Glukhovsky, whose new novel ‘Text’ has sold into 14 languages and/or territories to date.

For better or worse, Glukhovsky shows no fear in addressing the Kremlin and, as he puts it, “the ever-rotting, pretentious, cynical, and proudly immoral caste of Russian rulers.

“I believe that we live in truly wonderful times,” Glukhovsky tells us, “wonderful” for the writers willing to see what he defines as “an epoch of not only post-truth but also post-ethic.” It’s a time in which societies, he says, “are re-enacting the biggest traumas of the last century. Dictatorships. Cold War. Fascism.

“These are really the times when all a writer needs to do is sit down and focus carefully on the dubious reality unfolding around him. What’s the point of writing a dystopian fiction nowadays,” he asks, “when the reality is exceeding your wildest fantasies?

“The ruling class” of the Putin era, he says, “is losing touch with the reality. This process is going faster and faster, to the complete amazement of the public. The people deserve something bigger than just propaganda news stories on Russian. “Text speaks not only of the total corruption of Russian law-enforcement, but also of the arrival of a two-caste system within the Russian society. There’s a caste of people who are ‘the system’ or who serve it: officials, police and special services, the MPs—but also propaganda journalists, organized crime kingpins, and even church leadership. In Putin’s Russia, all of these institutions are just departments of one single government-corporation that rules and owns the country.

“Other, simpler people are like serfs in the old times. Let alone privileges, these ‘serfs’ don’t have any guarantees of such basic human rights as freedom, property, or even life.

“The most interesting part of that phenomenon is, however, that the higher caste now wants to free itself of all moral restrictions. Wants to be free of ethics. It exists in a system of coordinates, in which there’s no good and no evil, no justice or injustice, no right and no wrong. Only strength and weakness are the opposing sides of this system, and the only value is your corporate loyalty.”

https://publishingperspectives.com/2018/09/dmitry-glukhovsky-text-rights-russia-politics-frankfurt-book-fair/

[Cypress]

A strange, but weirdly poignant and beautiful body of poetry that gives of a whiff of tragedy, feminism, and melancholy. The backdrop of Stalinist persecution, tragedy, art, and creation makes, for me, a riveting tale.

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”

Anna Akhmatova



Anna Akhmatova was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most nominations for the award the following year

Persecuted by the Stalinist government, prevented from publishing, regarded as a dangerous enemy , but at the same time so popular on the basis of her early poetry that even Stalin would not risk attacking her directly, Akhmatova's life was hard. Her greatest poem, "Requiem," recounts the suffering of the Russian people under Stalinism -- specifically, the tribulations of those women with whom Akhmatova stood in line outside the prison walls, women who like her waited patiently, but with a sense of great grief and powerlessness, for the chance to send a loaf of bread or a small message to their husbands, sons, lovers. It was not published in in Russia in its entirety until 1987, though the poem itself was begun about the time of her son's arrest. It was his arrest and imprisonment, and the later arrest of her husband Punin, that provided the occasion for the specific content of the poem, which is sequence of lyric poems about imprisonment and its affect on those whose loveed ones are arrested, sentenced, and incarcerated behing prison walls..

The poet was awarded and honorary doctorate by Oxford University in 1965. Akhmatova died in 1966 in Leningrad.

https://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Akhmatova.htm

[Cypress]

Dovlatov - a Netflix film
"Over six days in 1971, brilliant writer Sergei Dovlatov encounters maddening barriers to publishing his work under the repressive Soviet regime/"

“If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.” - Sergei Dovlatov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rfXj9nfXE

[EddieSdroli]

I am looking for a book on the Sumerian civilization as translated from the tablets found. Not so much in story form, more like just the translations. Does a book like that exist? I just picked up the Epic of Gilgamesh because thats all they had no-corporate-stores-here lol. I am all for ordering here or somewhere else. i want to know about their way of life and their belief system as translated from the tabs.

Thanks in advance

ps- book on tape/audio book would be awesome

[Cypress]

“I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.” - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn


The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 1973)
I dedicate this
to all those who did not live
to tell it.
And may they please forgive me
for not having seen it all
nor remembered it all,
for not having divined all of it.
(Dedication)

“For years, I have with a reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.”
(Author's Note, Gulag Archipelago)

[evince]

This is on my nightstand, and next on deck for me to read.


Solzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the Soviet labour camp system - it is now regarded as one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

"It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech..."


https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894

its a darkly beautiful tale

[Cypress]

its a darkly beautiful tale

Day in the Life was a compelling read, and it is great to run across someone else who actually read it.

To me, the thing that is so striking, so arresting about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is his fierce integrity. He always said that spending time in the Gulag forced him to clarify and distill his priorities and ethical values. He claimed he was prepared for imprisonment, and even death, in order to play his role in advancing the truth. And he put his money where his mouth is, so his claims are not empty rhetoric.

[evince]

he was truly a beautiful human being


I was him for a short while


It helped from me intellectually


It was actually more intense then just reading it


acting can be like that if you immerse your self truly

[Cypress]

he was truly a beautiful human being

I was him for a short while

It helped from me intellectually

It was actually more intense then just reading it

acting can be like that if you immerse your self truly

My father once interviewed Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and Solzhenitsyn once asked to meet with my cousin’s husband. The impression I got from these family stories is that Solzhenitsyn was a complicated individual – a person of fierce integrity, a philosopher of the highest order, but a person who defies all attempts to place him into a box, ideology, or persuasion. Ruthlessly anti-communist, he nonetheless found capitalism almost equally morally depraved and spiritually bankrupt. Solzhenitsyn in some ways is almost a reactionary, a Russian mystic who pines for ideal of Eastern Orthodoxy, spiritual purity, and mysticism. Westerners who thought they could leverage Solzhenitsyn as a pawn, a pro-western mouth piece in their ideological war with the Kremlin were sorely disappointed. Solzehnitsyn is a traditional Russian nationalist, ethical philosopher, and Eastern Orthodox spiritualist in a way that garden-variety westerners can never understand. Your brush with A Day in the Life, gave you insights into the human condition most Americans do not have, in my opinion.

In this interview, Solzhenitsyn provides the opinion that Capitalism and selfishness – aided and abetted by Protestantism, ultimately leads to spiritual and moral degradation....an interesting take on things>>>


An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Pearce: A British journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism, is that a fair statement of your position and, if so, what do you feel are the worst evils of capitalism?

Solzhenitsyn: Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.

Pearce: Does the fact that modernity makes a virtue out of selfishness constitute one of the keys to its (capitalism’s) enduring success?

Solzhenitsyn: That's very correct. It does make a virtue out of selfishness and Protestantism made a major contribution to this.

Pearce: Why Protestantism?

Solzhenitsyn: Of course, one cannot declare that only my faith is correct and all other faiths are not. Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions. In this sense we have to admit that Protestantism has brought everything down only to faith.

Calvinism says that nothing depends on man, that faith is already predetermined. Also in its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism rushed to discard together with ritual all the mysterious, the mythical and mystical aspects of the Faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion.



https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/an-interview-with-alexander-solzhenitsyn.html

[Cypress]

Circling back to finish reading Gogol’s “Dead Souls”. Thank you, socialist public library!

Apparently, Gogol has become part of the asymmetric political and national rivalry between Russia and Ukraine. Weaponized literature. The cultural and historical milieu that was transmitted to me by family narrative was of a greater East Slavic federation of Great Russians, White Russians, and Little Russians. Whatever differences there were supposedly outweighed by East Slavic solidarity. That narrative may have been a manifestation of Russian conceit, because the reality of fierce nationalism and grievance is obviously real and palpable.


- Russia and Ukraine renew rivalry over Nikolai Gogol -
On 200th anniversary of literary giant Nikolai Gogol's birth, both countries lay claim to writer

First, it was politics, then it was gas. Now the protracted antagonism between Russia and Ukraine is taking on a literary tinge, as the bickering neighbours vie for the legacy of Nikolai Gogol on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Gogol is best known for scathing satirical masterpieces about Russian society such as Dead Souls and The Nose, but he also wrote intimately about his experience of Ukrainian customs in works such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

The writer was born and spent his youth in rural Ukraine - then part of the tsarist Russian empire - in the early 19th century, but wrote in Russian, lived some of his life in St Petersburg and was buried in Moscow. His nationality is the subject of intense public debate as the bicentenary approaches, with both states funding events to mark the occasion.

Aleksey Vertinsky, an actor at Kiev's academic youth theatre, told the Ukrainian press he was disgusted at Russian attempts to "adopt" Gogol. "They can get lost," he said. "If I announce this morning that I'm a blue trolleybus, does it mean I should drive off to the depot?" he added, in an absurdist afterthought that might have appealed to the writer himself.

But many experts in Moscow argue Gogol is "100% Russian". "A part of the political elite in Kiev wants to claim Gogol as their own so they can enter civilised Europe with at least one great Ukrainian writer," said Igor Zolotussky, a Russian authority on Gogol.

"But there can be no such discussion because there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian national identity. Gogol wrote and thought in Russian. He was a great Russian writer, full stop."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/31/nikolai-gogol-russia-ukraine

[Cypress]

Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground >>

My brief summary and take-aways :

Would you cast yourself out of paradise and into a state of abject misery in order to be free?

Would you work against your own economic and social best interest in order to cling to the elixir of free will?

[Cypress]

Here is what I did not know about Vladimir Mayakovsky, who at one time I thought was a stooge for the Bolsheviks.

He started out as a starry-eyed dreamer, confident that the Soviet system was ushering in an era of a Communist utopia.

By the late 1920s, he became obviously disgusted with the scale of lying and sycophancy in the regime. Rather than the new communist utopia he had naively imagined, he had lived to see a totalitarian Soviet communist system that would lead to the imprisonment of the human spirit. And his plays of the time reflected that sentiment and were therefore dangerous to even perform in a public theater.


The Bad Boy of Russian Poetry

When Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930, the news sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. Ilya Ehrenburg, who knew of Mayakovsky’s notorious gambling habit, thought he might have been playing Russian roulette with his beloved Mauser pistol and lost his bet. But Mayakovsky’s suicide note, written two days before his death, suggested otherwise. Asking his mother and sisters to forgive him and sardonically asking for there to be no gossip (“the deceased hated gossip”).

At the time of his death he was simultaneously involved with three different women: his longtime mistress, Lili Brik, with whom he had spent most of his adult life in a bohemian ménage à trois (together with her husband, Osip Brik), but who was just then involved with a movie director; Tatyana Yakovleva, a striking young White Russian whom Mayakovsky had met in Paris and asked to marry him, but who had just married a Frenchman instead; and Veronika Polonskaya, a sultry young stage actress, also married, to whom he had also proposed marriage. Emotionally he was a wreck, and his death might have been precipitated by his relations with any one of his paramours.

But that wasn’t the only mystery. In the tightly controlled Soviet Union, suicide was seen as a crime and an act of defiance, an assertion of personal freedom that contradicted the image of the state as a workers’ paradise.

Why would someone as famous and popular as Mayakovsky have killed himself, even under provocation? What most of his readers didn’t know was that for the first time since the October Revolution, Mayakovsky was seriously disaffected. Stalin had started to purge his regime of “Trotskyists” and other perceived enemies, and two recent satirical plays of Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, had aroused official anger with their frank criticisms of government leaders and corrupt bureaucrats. His enemies whispered that he, too, was a secret Trotskyist and an elitist, out of touch with his proletarian base.

He was already being shadowed by the OGPU (the secret police), and its agents swarmed through his apartment the moment his death became known. They had long since penetrated Mayakovsky’s inner circle. Osip Brik had been an agent of the secret police in the early 1920s and he and Lili still maintained close contact with them; and the official death notice and the official death notice was signed by no fewer than three secret agents, in addition to a couple of Mayakovsky’s literary allies.

<continued>
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/mayakovsky-bad-boy-russian-poetry/

[Cypress]

Put this on my library reading list - My grandmother was from a Don Cossack family, and I cannot believe I have waited this long to read Sholokhov.


"And Quiet Flows the Don"
By Mikhail Sholokhov

"An extraordinary Russian masterpiece, And Quiet Flows the Don follows the turbulent fortunes of the Cossack people through peace, war and revolution - among them the proud and rebellious Gregor Melekhov, who struggles to be with the woman he loves as his country is torn apart. Borne of Mikhail Sholokhov's own early life in the lands of the Cossacks by the river Don, it is a searing portrait of a nation swept up in conflict, with all the tragic choices it brings." — Penguin Books synopsis

Mikhail Sholokhov’s groundbreaking epic novel gives a sweeping depiction of Russian life and culture in the early 20th century. In the same vein as War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, And Quiet Flows the Don gives readers a glimpse into many aspects of Russian culture, and the choices a country makes when faced with war and destruction. In his enormous epic of Cossack life during the Revolution…Mikhail Sholokhov has achieved even greater power, sustained narrative gift and stirring human truthfulness.” —New York Times

“In addition to its panoramic grandeur, the wealth of its characters and its historic realism, Sholokhov’s book is memorable for its portrayal of the primitive and already almost legendary life of the Don Cossacks.”
—Malcolm Cowley, New Republic

[Cypress]

This is one I just started. I am amazed Zoshchenko managed to get away with writing satire and social criticism of life during the Stalinist regime. His method apparently was to camouflage his satire and criticism within cleverly constructed prose and metaphor. That took no small amount of courage, because getting on the wrong side of Stalin could earn one a one-way ticket to the Gulag.


Nervous People and Other Satires
by Mikhail Zoshchenko

Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts.

Zoshchenko's sharp and original satire offers a marvelous window on Russian life in the 20s and 30s.


source credit - GoodReads summary

[Cypress]

This is one I just started. I am amazed Zoshchenko managed to get away with writing satire and social criticism of life during the Stalinist regime. His method apparently was to camouflage his satire and criticism within cleverly constructed prose and metaphor. That took no small amount of courage, because getting on the wrong side of Stalin could earn one a one-way ticket to the Gulag.

This clever little satire by Zoshchenko caught my eye. In a few short sentences, he eviscerates the inefficiency of the Soviet economic system and how it manifested as comic discord in people's everyday lives. It is hard to believe he got things like this past the censors in Stalin's Soviet Russia, but I suppose his satire was camouflaged and two degrees removed from him personally, enough to offer him plausible deniability.


A Clever Little Trick, by Mikhail Zoshchenko

I don't know how it is in Moscow, but here in Leningrad they sell only powerful electric light bulbs. Something like one hundred and fifty, two hundred, or four hundred candle power.

And as for consumers who dream of obtaining a light bulb of ten or maybe fifteen candle power, theirs prove to be truly senseless dreams. Such light bulbs are not for sale.

Well, I thought, they send these small bulbs to the provinces for use in the villages. And that calmed me down.

Now my old bulbs had burned out. I got three new ones of four hundred candle power each and basked in this bright light. Of course, it's annoying. It's very bright. The main thing is, I'm not a draftsman. It's so ridiculously bright in the hall and the bathroom that you just start to feel bad. But I stood it.

But this month the meter reader came. Started to check how much electricity I had burned up.

"Oho!" he says. "Your bill gets higher every month. What are you doing, frying potatoes in the electricity?"

I say, "No, I've got powerful bulbs. And I just don't know what to do. It's a hopeless situation."

Well, I got to talking with the meter reader. A lot of chit-chat. He had a glass of tea with me. Ate a roll. And then he says, "You know why there aren't any small bulbs? Shall I tell you?"

I say, "Tell me, but it'll hardly make me feel any better."

He says, "There's a big trick being played with the small bulbs. The whole thing has to do with the financial-industrial plan."

"I'm afraid I don't quite get you," I said.

He says, "The factory had to fulfill its plan. Well, so they went and fulfilled it."

"No," I say, "Ever since so much light has been beating down on me in this apartment, my bean doesn't work so well. I don't understand you."

"What is there," he says, "to understand? Well let's suppose that according to the plan they had to fulfill a production quota of a million candle power. Well, now just imagine-- are they going to start producing this million in small bulbs? They wouldn't make it in two years, the devils. So they decided to get there with big bulbs. Whether you make small bulbs or big ones, the work is the same. But you don't need nearly so many. And so, those devils have settled on big bulbs. They're turning them out like pancakes."

I said, "But that's a filthy trick! And also it's no joy to us that the government is wasting a lot of valuable electric power. Take me-- I have four hundred candle power in the toilet. I really feel guilty about going in there."

He said, "Be grateful that they didn't settle on the biggest bulbs of all. Next year they'll probably start turning out bulbs with a thousand candle power."

At this point I suddenly got mad.

"Instead of shooting off your mouth to me," I said, "you should tell me where I can get some small bulbs."

He said, "Even though I work for the electric service, I haven't laid eyes on any small bulbs for two years now."

With these words he said good-bye and departed. And I turned off the lights in the room, lay down on the bed, and in the darkness started thinking about what tricks people resort to in order to balance their office accounts.

[Cypress]

Bad-mouthing and maligning of Russia and Russians overlooks the fact that there are Russians who are willing to risk their jobs, even risk going to prison, rather than submit to Vladimir Putin.

That kind of courage is completely lacking in the American Republican Party, whom meekly submitted to Putin without firing a shot.


Masha Gessen is a Russian-American author, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin and the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been "an aspiring thug" and that "the backward evolution of Russia began" within days of his inauguration in 2000.

Gessen was dismissed from her position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after she refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin because she considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns.


Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen on Putin and Trump

PBS interview with Masha Green: “Putin runs a mafia state. There’s no such thing in Russia as a national interest that is distinct from Putin’s personal accrual of power and money. It’s different from any kind of dictatorship or tyranny. A mafia state is a distinct phenomenon. And we have Trump, who I think would have a mafia state if he could get away with it, and that’s certainly what he has been trying to build.”


Sources
wikipedia
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/russian-american-journalist-masha-gessen-on-putin-and-trump/

[Cypress]

homage to kin sent to the Vorkuta camps.


"Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree. Mute separations, mute black, bloody events in every family. Invisible mourning worn by mothers and wives. Now the arrested are returning, and two Russias stare each other in the eyes: the ones that put them in prison and the ones who were put in prison. A new epoch has begun. You and I will wait for it together."

- Anna Akhmatova, 1956

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"I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Solzhenitsyn Says West Is Failing as Model for World
"Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn



Exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn yesterday denounced western society, which he said has taken on a terrible similarity to the state-controlled societies of the communist world in its suffocation of spiritual life.

In a bleak and powerful speech at Harvard University's commencement, Solzhenitsyn said "our spiritual life" has been lost in both the West and the East, and he called for a "spiritual upsurge."

The Nobel Prize laureate came to Harvard from his seclusion in Vermont to deliver his first major speech in three years.

He titled his speech "A World Split Apart," but it could as well have been called "The Decline of the West."

After prefacing his address by saying "Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter . . . but I want to stress that [my speech] comes not from an adversary, but from a friend," Solzhenitysn launched a long, scathing attack on western society as morally bankrupt.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/06/09/solzhenitsyn-says-west-is-failing-as-model-for-world/69e9fb6c-60d6-41f3-9022-606631a60e35/

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When a poet confronted Russia with the Holocaust

With ‘Babi Yar,’ Russia’s beloved dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko forced his countrymen to acknowledge their roles in the mass genocide of their Jewish neighbors

Very rarely, a poem changes the way a nation remembers its history. Russian dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” was one such poem.

Penned in 1961, “Babi Yar” refers to the ravine in Kiev, Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and collaborators during two unprecedented days of slaughter in World War II. Until Yevtushenko’s poem denounced Soviet authorities for covering up the Holocaust and stoking new forms of anti-Semitism, the genocide had been almost totally repressed in the region where it began.

Remembered for criticizing the Soviet system in hundreds of poems, he wrote “Babi Yar” after visiting the infamous ravine more than half a century ago. On the site where the largest massacre of the Holocaust took place, the poet noticed that not one memorial had been erected.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-a-poet-confronted-russia-with-the-holocaust/

Babi Yar -- Yevgenny Yevtushenko

No monument stands over Babi Yar
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old as the entire Jewish race itself.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
abused your purest name, in the name of hatred.

There is no Jewish blood in me, it's true. 　
But with their callous ossified revulsion　
Antisemites must hate me like a Jew
And that is what makes me a true Russian.