Anna Karenina is usually my favourite but as with most 'top ten' lists it fluctuates. Vote for your favourite on my list.


What would be on your list?

Of these AK by Tolstoy which is every way is perfect.

I'd add Master & Margarita and some more that I can't think of at the moment. :D

One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Voted for Anna

However the best Russian story for me is ' the living and the dead' by Konstantin Simonov.

Its a fascinating insight to the Russian peasant phyce and how the Russians treat death against a backdrop of an invading army.

Gogol on the frontispiece described Dead Souls as a poem. I think it was both the first modern novel and the start of magical realism. Anyway, it's my favorite and the more I read it and the more I read about it the more I like it. Remember that only Part 1 is the Dead Souls usually referred to because Part 2 and the fragments are a sorry apology for Part 1.
Although it's a novella, First Love by Turgenev is very good.

I would've liked to have seen We by Zamyatin on the list.

Hard to decide between Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The latter has more to say, but the former is more "stand alone" - for example you don't have to have any idea what a slavophil is to appreciate C&P whereas the more you know about the domestic political scene in the 1860-70s, the more you'll get out of The BK.

On the other hand, Dosters is prolix, whereas Gogol buzzes with the economy of words used. How many options can we vote for? I'd need at least three.

Tolstoy...hmmm...unlike Gogol and Dosters, Tolstoy reads like history, whereas the other two still speak of the modern human condition. Tolstoy did have a hugely impressive beard though, so we'll let him off.

Anyway, when I was young and a revolutionary Marxist i.e. before I grew up, I learned Russian and went over there. An eye opening experience, that's for sure.

Tolstoy censored Checkov: Booo. Hisss.

Dead Souls from the list - but not read them all and am no expert on Russian anything.

War & Peace - any good?
Must be one of the most talked about things I've never wanted to read.

War & Peace? good writing, excellent writing really I think, but suffers from Tolstoy's penchant for moralizing and idealizing the Russian peasant.
If you want to read a long book, I would again recommend The Recognitions by the American, William Gaddis

Crime and punishment just pips War and Peace in this list for me.

I read quite a lot of Russian literature about twenty five years ago, but have read nothing in the last fifteen years. I remember quite liking Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, but preferred Gogol’s short stories to Dead Souls. I’ve only read one short story by Andreyev, which was excellent. I’ll have to see if I can get something else, nothing was in print back when I was reading the others.

Solzhenitsyn is not worthy of this list.

Well, on your say so I'll set aside March and April next year to read it :)

:applaud:

His books are important, true, but as literature...hmm.

It'll take you that long :)

As for long books, I'd recommend The Tale Of Genji by Lady Murasaki - it's the world's first (surviving) novel, and is getting on for being a thousand years old.

I concur most heartily with Dostoyesky and Gogol.

I would add:

The Master And Margarita/Bulgakov
Hero Of Our Time/Lermontov
Envy/Olesha (short, I know)
Oblomov/Goncharov

but definitely not Mother by Gorky, which is officially the most tedious novel ever written in the history of the world.

Pushkin for me, although I like his short stories even better. Apparently he's as 'big' in Russia as Dickens is in the English-speaking world.

Well, Eugene Onegin is a poem so I didn't consider voting for it for that reason. I would say, from what I've read, Pushkin is even more revered there than Dickens is in the UK.
I don't care for his short stories, even The Black Queen.
Now Gogol wrote a few of the world's finest short stories like The Overcoat, The Nose and Diary of a Madman.
Pushkin & Gogol were friends even as dissimilar as they were.
A whole book of letters was published between Nabakov and Edmund Wilson, the latter claiming you could not translate Onegin into English as a poem and Nabakov doing just that but not to Wilson's approval and standards. A lifetime's friendship shattering is in those fascinating letters.

Not qualified to answer this one; I found Bulkagov's "The Master and Margherita" so annoying that I developed a prejudice against Russian literature (at least in translated form) and so far have missed out on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, et al. (I did like "Fathers and Sons" though; that one was short enough that I gave it a go.)

Edit: My initial motivation for hitting "Reply" was to commend you for leaving off the Bulgakov.

Voted for Crime & Punishment. Would have voted "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Is "We" really a Russian novel as it was originally written in English and aslo not in Russia?

I concur.

These are all very literary. I have to say that this is one of the best books I've read (and it doesn't take long).

Well, there you go, you learn something new everyday on The Fall Forum. Ok, I retract my comment that "We" should be on the list. Apologies to Ducky.

Anyway, after muich umming and aahing, I'm going to vote for Brothers Karamazov (if it'll let me). I think it's peak moments - The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan's meeting with the Devil, the conversations between Smerdyakov and Ivan and so on - are just that bit better than the peak moments of Crime and Punishment.

Anyway, I'm off to spam the forum with disco music in case I get an undeserved reputation for intelligence. Like Prince Myshkin, I'm an Idiot and proud of it.

From the list I've only read Crime and Punishment, and I have Dead Souls, but haven't managed to get through it yet.

I shouldn't worry. Nor did the author.

:lol: :applaud:

They don't do comedy well do they, the Ruskies?

Dead Souls - Part 1 only - not too long...stay away from part 2....Gogol was shocked at what he had written, or everyone said he had written, and tried to apologize for it....a strange man, as was known at the time.

He also said you shouldn't revise more than 8 times; it's not productive to do that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_H...an_Nikiforovich

Would someone do a French novels poll?

OK, so apart from "The Squabble" ..............................

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy_(novel)

The Two Ivans and How They Came to Quarrel by Gogol is quite funny

Or "The Squabble", as Snowy insists on calling it.

Village Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is hilarious also. It's full of shaggy dog stories with lines like "I swear without a word of a lie, the hut grew legs and ran away".

There's lots of humour even in Dosters - it's just often a bit black. Don't let their reputation put you off, Stephen; Joy Division are infinitely more depressing than the Russians. At the end of the day, both C&P and Brothers K are uplifting novels.

I merely quoted your link. <_<

When DP says "Quite funny", I doubt if he is applying the typical English understatement.

What do you want, blood?

Er... there's a good bit in The Cherry Orchard when one of them can't find his galoshes. That always raises a smile.

Google and humorous russian novels is running quite slow I see

:mellow:

Type in "social realism". That might speed things up.

You can read Dead Souls here and find out how funny it is.

I'll do one if no one else can be arsed! I haven't read many of them, though....

Thanks. But you have to read all of the books first.

I've read them.

They're rubbish.