100 books like Dostoevsky and the Novel

This is, in my opinion, the best short history of Russia (only about 100 pages). It’s full of unexpected ideas, provocative and challenging.

It was published in 2003 and is written from the perspective of a Russia in decline (Russia of the 1990s, before Putin), but nevertheless offers a brilliant analysis of why the country has tended toward isolationism and xenophobia. It is thus almost predictive of Putin’s recent break with the West. I have assigned it to classes and recommend it to friends.

Hidden in Plain View makes us see Tolstoy in a completely new light. I find Morson one of the most engaging critics of the Russian classics, and this is perhaps his best and most curmudgeonly argumentative book.

It offers a brilliant reading of War and Peace as an “anti-novel”—as an attack on the form and philosophical suppositions of the “novel” (the word in Russian can also refer to a literary or real-life “romance”).

It follows in the footsteps of the Russian critic-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed the novel as a dialogical, open-ended “anti-genre,” without a fixed form, that cannibalizes all other genres. In War and Peace, this also serves to explain Tolstoy’s attack on history-writing, which shares the false, “closed” narrative presumptions as novel romances. 

Red Square, Black Square is a unique, fragmented “postmodern” critique of Russian avant-garde and revolutionary ideas that bleeds into a deconstruction of Soviet ersatz culture that took its cue from them.

It combines horror and comedy, seriousness and self-satire, and itself partakes of the style and language (as well as the punning wit) of the avant-garde. I found it challenging and fun to read and full of surprises.

Gogol is one of the weirdest and most fascinating of Russian writers, whose eccentric comic masterpieces continue to entertain and puzzle us. His identity as a Ukrainian who became a Russian classic and the way this is or isn’t reflected in his works has long been debated.

Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity makes sense of these two contending national components of Gogol’s writing and career. Ilchuk demonstrates the remarkable ways his “hybrid” national identity played out: in his often bizarre language, an uncanny Russian pervaded by Ukrainianisms (made more or less evident in successive, ideologically-motivated editings); in his works’ narrative structure, plot, and theme; and in the author’s odd behavior in society as a colonial “other.”

The book helped me understand the ins and outs of post-colonial theory, which the author presents in a clear and effective way.  It also unexpectedly illuminated for me aspects of Russian imperial identity that… show more.

The author was an old fraud but this is a delightful period piece which reveals a good deal, sometimes inadvertently, about the lives of Russians in the benighted Soviet sixties.

Writing about the end of the Cold War, Mary Sarotte argues the fall of the Berlin Wall was not inevitable and that the United States was not the dominant player. She focuses instead on the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s drive for German reunification and a new architecture for post-Cold War Europe. More significantly, her book was one of the first to treat 1989 not as an endpoint in international relations but as a beginning.

I found it hard to choose between several of Edward Crankshaw’s books explaining Russia. Each, in its own way, uncovers a particular aspect of history or society that makes the country what it is. In the end, I settled on this, his first: published in 1947, not long after Crankshaw had been posted to Moscow during WWII, and while he was still reeling from the vast gulf between what he experienced there and the image of the USSR that was being sold abroad. 

Crankshaw was sometimes accused of being too sympathetic to Russia, but while he does his best to explain why the country behaves as it does, he doesn’t seek to excuse it. For that reason I find this one of the most clear-headed appraisals of Russia. And given the continuities that run through all of Russian history, his rationalising of how Russia works and what it does is… show more.

Russia has historically connected to Europe as its significant other. This book describes the nature of the country’s identity development through the love-hate relations with European nations and search for recognition by Western other. Sometimes, Russia has sought to borrow Europe’s institutions and values. Other times, it has positioned itself as a great power and a superior system of internal values relative to “corrupt” Europe. 

You won’t be curling up in bed with this two-volume, 2,272-page encyclopedic history of cartography in the European Renaissance—but if you’ve got a passion for maps, or if you want the most comprehensive source of information on the cartography of the period, it’s a delightful and even essential work to consult. The essays are diverse and deeply informative, and the reproductions, including 80 gorgeous color plates, are a treat to spend time with.

The most compelling aspect of Mirror of the Soul is its analysis of the great poet Tyutchev’s bi-polar temperament and compulsive philandering. He was a forgivable Don Juan, in that he deeply empathized with his victims, although his misbehaviour shortened the lives of his first wife and of his most infatuated mistress. Morbidly irresponsible, he impregnated at least two mistresses and both his wives before marriage. Joy was for Tyutchev a thin veneer of light over misery and darkness; deaths of those close to him and contrition (if not guilt) finally reconciled him, in a death-bed poem, with a “punitive God” who removes everything — “breath, willpower, sleep” — leaving just an aggrieved, loving wife as his intermediary. Mirror of the Soul is beautifully written and edited. It will be, for a long time, the standard work on Tyutchev, doubtless in Russia, too.