My Year of Russian Literature

There are those times when, like a thorn in the soul, anxiety sets in, and the dark winter night of the soul lasts a great many hours. And in those moments, I try to read or write, and, almost wryly, think that life must surely have been written with the psychological pomp and gritty depths of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel. Why read bouncy, sunny literature when there is a world of Dostoevsky, Poe, and Plath out there?

In times like these, I collect words like they are the very fabric of existence and I am but a foolish costumer of the human condition. It is a powerful collection: I’ve got books by Richard Brautigan, Tracy K. Smith, Virginia Woolf, Denise Chávez, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Luis Alberto Urrea to tide me over from one bleak mood to the next. I have Luci Tapahonso and Jack London to deliver me from uneasiness and poems by Zbigniew Herbert to coax me to a state of hope. So as I sat among my books, breathing in their reassuring papery smell, I committed myself to a life of language, a life of sentences sprouting into paragraphs and little pebbles of ideas avalanching into a blizzard of literature.

That avalanche brought me here, to what I am calling My Year of Russian Literature. As an aspiring student of literature, I have been putting together my own curriculum of world storytelling, beginning this year (October 2020 to September 2021) with Dostoevsky himself, then plunging into the Great East with biographies and novels alike swirling together in a palette of ideas and stories and glorious translations. On the syllabus is Leo Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, Anton Chekov, Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita being among my favorite books), as well as the dusting off of my dear Russian language textbook. I will be blogging about Russian prose and poetry here for the next year, and this is your formal invitation to join me. May words light a candle in the darkness.

Language awaits, and language abounds.