Where to Start With the Russians

Sooner or later every serious reader feels the pull of the Russians — the sense that the deepest things the novel can do were done in Russia in the nineteenth century. But the door can feel forbidding: the enormous books, the unpronounceable names, the reputation for gloom. Here is a map.

Start small. Do not begin with the thousand-page monsters. Begin with Gogol’s Overcoat, the story it all came out of, or with a handful of Chekhov’s short stories — the gentlest, most human way in.

Then choose your giant. The two great rivals divide most readers. Tolstoy sees from above, serene and godlike, the master of how life actually feels; start with Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky burns from within, feverish and extreme, the master of the soul in crisis; start with Crime and Punishment, then The Brothers Karamazov.

And know the source. Behind all of them stands Pushkin, who made the language sing. Read him and you see where the whole tradition begins.

The Russians are not gloomy. They are serious — they believed the novel could ask the largest questions about God, death, freedom and love, and answer them. No other literature repays the effort so completely. Erato Press publishes them all; this is where to begin.

Start with Pushkin — the Erato Press edition →