So Maybe It’s a Journey
Privjet to all readers (hi, Mom)!
Four score and several months ago, I set myself the task of a Year of Russian Literature with the dream of fabulously blazing through everything from Crime and Punishment to Heart of a Dog, from the poetry of Anna Akhmatova to the plays of Anton Chekov in neat and tidy cycles of twelve months, to be capstoned with my great project: Reading and annotating various translations of War and Peace.
Oh, but it would seem I was young and frolicking and believed that it would be possible to read The Brothers Karamazov on a stationary bike.
This is really all to say that I have changed my Year of Russian Literature to my Journey Through Russian Literature, for as every easily sidetracked reader knows, it is not fair to place cheap bookends of arbitrary time on a quest for the beauty and knowledge of literature. I still read Joseph Frank’s superb Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time with happiness and gratitude. I still lurch through the pages of Crime and Punishment, bearing the weight of a dense and singularly rich snapshot of the dark night of the human soul. Fundamentally, to read Russian literature, and I can say this even in my as-yet-still-nebulous understanding of the classics that greet me, is to realize what horror and what good we all are capable of, what redemption awaits in a well-loved, dog-eared book. What it means to be human in the tempests of history and tragedy.
This brings me to Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance, which I have just begun and look forward to reading with fervor. Natasha’s Dance documents Russia from the perspective of her artists, her writers, and her musicians, and how could the world be anything less than striking when viewed this way? I believe Figes here is casting a scope on modern Russia and the Soviet Union, a time of great satires like Mikhail Bulgakov’s beloved (including by me) The Master and Margarita and Akhmatova and her elegies. Though I do not know yet whether Figes will address these specific authors, I want to see society through the dreamy lens of its creators, for to see its webs of creativity is to see both the past and the future — that is the promise of art, of all arts.
I hope you (Mom) will join me on a journey through Russian literature. It is a new day.
