JRL NEWSWATCH: “What To Read To Understand Russia” – The Atlantic/ Anastasia Edel
” …[A]uthors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature. But … Anastasia Edel, … author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution, and the New Tsar, … suggests … readers who want to comprehend Putin’s Russia look to Chevengur, an epic account of the Russian Revolution, written in 1929 by … Soviet writer Andrey Platonov. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and wasn’t widely available there until the late 1980s ….”
Edel also recommends:
- Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev
- Evgeny Shvarts’s 1944 fabulist play, The Dragon.
- Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog: satirical novella characterizing the ‘victorious proletariat’ whose heirs rule Russia today
- The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes on Shostakovich
- Anna Politkovskaya’s 2004 book, Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
- Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
- Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014)
- Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra (1992)
- Anton Chekhov short stories like “Misery,” “The Student,” “Ward No. 6”
- Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat
- Astolphe de Custine’s Letters From Russia