Both of the Tolstoy titles included in the Art of the Novella series are later works. The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886, 11 years after Anna Karenina and 17 years after War and Peace. And while The Devil wasn’t published until the twentieth century, it was apparently written around 1888, the [...]
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My Life was published in 1896, five years after The Duel, but it seems in some perhaps superficial ways to have the qualities of an earlier work. The first-person narrator is a young man, and a very idealistic one, who has found himself idle in his posts as a clerk and has given up [...] Anton Chekhov’s rather long novella, The Duel, originally published in 1891, is the book that has so far most surpassed my expectations of it. My expectations were not low; I haven’t read all that much Chekhov, but what I have I thought was wonderful. Still, that doesn’t mean a novella—so many of which are [...] The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, has some scenes that are first-rate: well-constructed and affecting. Anthony points to the Kafkaesque qualities of scenes like the one at the sick bed before the family goes to the opera; this is certainly one of them. Ivan Ilych is consumed by his illness and [...] While I’ve been reading the Russian-authored titles from the Art of the Novella series in chronological order, I haven’t been posting on them that way. The two earliest, Alexander Pushkin’s The Tales of Belkin and Nikolai Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled were re-reads for me, so I saved them for Friday and gave [...] The Eternal Husband is one of the volumes in the Art of the Novella series that really pushes the bounds of the word “novella.” At over 200 pages, albeit small ones, it seems a short novel to me, and a bit of a strange one. What can that mean? All Dostoevsky is strange to [...] Anthony said his reading of Ivan Turgenev’s First Love may have tipped his preference between Dostoevsky and Turgenev a bit toward the former. While I have not yet had the pleasure of all Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (I fully intend to), I can see that this is weaker than what I have [...] Over in the comments to Emily’s post on The Luzhin Defense, she and Amateur Reader have an interesting discussion about Luzhin’s mental illness and his childhood lack of affection for his father, and what that father is like. And here, yesterday, AR made the claim that Mrs. Luzhin is linked to Luzhin’s father, not [...] It sounds perverse, but Nabokov’s introductions to the English translations of his Russian works have been almost more interesting than the books themselves. VN on VN is quite amusing. In the foreword to The Luzhin Defense, he explains that [T]he chess effects I planted are distinguishable not only in these separate scenes; their concatenation [...] When does a master become a master? I don’t consider this the question behind my single-author-projects, not by a long shot, but of course it’s something you’re watching, noticing, waiting for. It makes me think of Salieri—is genius like this written on the face, and if so, from when? I mean, written on the [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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