Over the last few weeks I have collected a fair swag of Russian world history and literature. It is part of a dream, or I suppose now a plan, I have to collect central and peripheral texts from the Russian canon, and become something of a late life Russian expert, as well as a lifelong Russophile.
Let’s keep it simple. A list.
- Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, as translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky
- Pushkin, Novels, Tales and Journeys: the Complete Prose, also by this marvelllous translator pair
- Katzner’s comprehensive Russian-English Dictionary, because, yes, I am learnign Russian language
- Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
- Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union
- Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety
- Marie Favereaux, The Horde: how the Mongols change the world, because one way the Mongols did so was through the Russian world
- Catherine Merridale, Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin
- Merridale, Lenin on the Train, which of course I have already read and commented on here
- Alexander Zhuchovsky, 85 Days in Slavansk, which has recently been translated and tells the story of the war in the Donbass from 2014.
All these great texts will both fill my well and be featured here on the blog, in my podcast and in the writing to come.
If you have not done so already check out my podcast, The Burning Archive. I have just done an episode on the Medici family of Renaissance Europe, and a new episode on the history of the Mafia is coming up in the next week. And in a month or so I will be commencing a special series on Russian culture and history which will take the podcast deep into the year.
