As I noted yesterday, I’ve been following along in Caryl Emerson’s highly interesting and enjoyable Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature as I’ve gone from Pushkin up, so far, through Dostoevsky. I’ve always been ambivalent at best about Dostoevsky, not having cared at all for Crime and Punishment, but going into Poor Folk I had [...]
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Fyodor Dostoevsky—or at least, Makar Devushkin—read a bunch of the same Russian lit as I’ve been lately, I found out in Poor Folk. Not that I was surprised he was more than familiar with Pushkin and Gogol; but I wasn’t expecting them to crop up so explicitly in my other reading. Poor Folk (sometimes [...] Before A Hero of Our Time (1839), Mikhail Lermontov wrote many things, including a poem (1837) after the death of Pushkin that would get him sent to the Caucasus. As his Wikipedia entry quite romantically notes, “the tsar had exiled him to his native land,” and Lermontov would proceed to write the novel that [...] Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, eponymous Hero of Our Time, is deliciously evil, and also just plain delicious because he knows the power of words—almost as well as Mikhail Lermontov. The travel writer who has come into possession of his papers publishes a portion of them, noting in the foreword*: Reading through these notes, I have [...] A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov’s only novel, and a short one, is the kind of thing that gets me warmed up right away: a small, faceted, framed thing, filtering its story through several layers of mesh and coming out the other side with multiple narrators and a nonchronological plot. Readers of all [...] Despite its long presence in my sidebar, I only just started reading A Hero of Our Time last night, and I should really just clear my mind of all expectations about any book I haven’t read yet because they seem to be wrong more often than not lately. Anyway, I freaking love it. Love. [...] The lovely Claire reminds us today to check back in on discussion of The Waves for posts recently added to the list—I went back through last night and some great stuff has been written (you know, other than my post). So if all this talk of Woolf makes you want to read this lovely [...] It’s no secret that 2666 is long. So long that my edition comes in three volumes, that I’m participating in a months-long group read of it, and that I’m through the first three parts and still have no idea what it’s about. I mean, I can tell you that it’s about the femicides in [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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