Ok – I saw this challenge, hosted by Keely, and decided it was irresistible. In 2014 I participated in o’s Russian Literature challenge, which was awesome, so I’m more than ready for another Russian lit focus!
I’ll be aiming for a large Level 2 “Chekhov”; these six books:
- Forever Flowing – Vasily Grossman. I heard about Grossman from one of my favorite book bloggers, SRK, and this sounds like a really good novel.
- The Letter Killers Club – Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. I loved this author’s writing style in Memories of the Future. This book is about a club of story tellers who are committed to writing nothing down.
- Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while, a Powell’s splurge. The Soviet era interests me, for academic and personal reasons, and I’m eager to read more by Solzhenitsyn, since he is one of the most famous Soviet authors.
- Five Plays – Anton Chekhov. One by the man himself! I haven’t read any of these plays, just heard good things about them.
- Eugene Onegin – Alexander Pushkin. Onegin is one of my greatest favorite novels of all time (seriously). I’ve read four English translations in the last several years; my personal goal is to read as many translations as I can find!
- ✓ We – Yevgeny Zamyatin. My “read” list is woefully lacking most dystopian classics. This one sounds very interesting, apparently a precursor to 1984.
Yes, I know…no Dostoyevsky. He’ll probably sabotage my list, though; he has a way of cutting in front of the line…
Classics Considered 