Top 10 Russian Authors of all time (and top 10 Russian Novels)

Привет, дорогие друзья! Hi everyone! In this video I'll give you a brief history of Russian literature by talking about top 10 novels of Russian literature that spans a period of 130 years from 1830s to 1960s. These are a combination of my favorite Russian novels and also those that are considered the best of Russian literature. So if you are interested in Russian literature or want to read a few novels from the cold country but don't know where to begin, this video is for you. It's also for those who are curious what these big novels are generally about. So let's begin by asking why Russian literature in the first place. The golden age of Russian literature between 1830s and 1880s. A 50-year period produced some of the best-known Russian novelists such as Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, and my favorite, Fyodor Dostoevsky. I'm absolutely in love with Russian literature. There are a few reasons. First, I love the raw honesty in Russian novels. There is no sugarcoating or dilly-dallying about life or the human condition. I often describe Russian literature like a good punch in the face. It brings me to my senses from my cozy slumbers from time to time. Another reason I love Russian novels is they are mostly novels of ideas. They go deep philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically. The Russians learn novel writings from the French. Instead of just copying them, they decided to take it much deeper, further into the recess of socio-political entanglements and human psyche. They capture the modern condition beautifully. A godless world, free from traditions, yet terrifying at the same time. Tolstoy captured the nightmares of groups, armies, governments, and nations. Dostoevsky captured the nightmares of the individuals. Turgenev captured the moody, angry young men. Goncharov and Gogol made beautiful dark comedies out of Russian class system. Chekhov depicted everyday life. Let's begin with a national poet and the father of Russian literature. 1833 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin for Russian is like Shakespeare is to the English. Even today his poems are memorized and recited by Russians. He was also the grandson of African prince who made his way to Russia via Turkey in 18th century. Eugene Onegin is a novel and verse and the first major literary work of Russian literature which inspired future writers such as Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev and many more. The theme of the book is very similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that it's society, he means city, that turns humans into selfish monsters. People are much nicer in the countryside but once they are exposed to the city life they can never unsee what they have seen. There's a great deal of drama, romance, and even a duel in this novel. Pushkin himself died in a duel at the age of 37 which made him a as well as a literary sensation. 1839 A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. This is the first important Russian novel written in prose which inspired the golden age writers that came after. It's a very short novel about being a man, the trial and tribulations of masculinity and the terrifying ordeal of playing the masculine role in society. Pechorin is a hero but also anti-hero, heroic but also deeply flawed at the same time. Any man can resonate with this novel. Lermontov too died in a duel like his hero Pushkin at the age of 26. Now he's the second Russian writer who wrote about a duel and died in one. Is it coincidence? There might be a correlation between imagination and reality. If you imagine something there's a chance it might happen. In Russia he's best known for his poetry and A Hero of Our Time is his only novel in prose. 1842 Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Gogol was a fantastic and funny storyteller. His short story The Nose has inspired many writers around the world including Chinese, Japanese and Western authors. His masterpiece Dead Souls is about a ruthless businessman who buys dead serfs from the landowners in order to accumulate enough in his book to take a large bank loan. Basically a quick scheme to get rich by defrauding a bank. Very funny and also revealing of the dying landed gentry in Russia, foretelling the socio-political turmoil that came afterwards. It's probably the only novel in which people think you can make money from dead people. Gogol died at the age of 42 after refusing to eat for nine days. He also burned the manuscript for the second volume of Dead Souls. Okay no more suicides, Gogol was the last of the Russian romantics. Now we enter the age of dead serious realism, not quite. 1859 Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. Perhaps the laziest character in literature is Mr. Oblomov, an aristocrat who can barely manage to get out of bed, thinking that being inactive is the ultimate human achievement. It's hilarious and profound at the same time as it revealed how lethargic and stagnant the Russian aristocracy had become, suffering from something called Oblomovitis, a state of perpetual sleep. He lived like a panda, leaving others to feed him and make babies for him. Laziness is as universal as love, but there are very few novels written about it. I say it's time we should write more about it. I think every culture has some folk tales about lazy boys or girls. There's one in the Philippines called Juan Tamat. Oblomov unfortunately doesn't have the same fame and fortune as some other novels. Perhaps partly due to its theme, in capitalism laziness is the biggest sin of all. Now we enter the world of the big guns of Russian literature by Kalashnikov, I mean just as lethal. 1862 Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev was perhaps the most western of all Russian writers in 19th century, had a massive brain, twice as big as average person. His novels are written in a more objective and journalistic style, letting his characters do and talk as they wish, similar to Gustav Lebert, who incidentally was also his friend. Fathers and Sons is about an angry young man, Bazarov, educated in Europe who returns to Russia and clashes with his father over their different outlook on world and life. Conflict between generations and the theme of nihilism dominate the novel. Quote, death is an old story but new to each person, end quote. It's a very short novel by Russian standard. In my other video on Russian literature I discussed his short story called First Love, which is also worth reading. It's a brilliant but dark tale of a young man's first experience of love, which is more like a first punch in the face. 1866 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's magnus opus is Brothers Karamazov, which he completed just before he died in 1882. Dostoevsky articulates different views and voices beautifully, nowhere he's more precise in articulate than Crime and Punishment. I made a whole video about it and you can watch it here. It's the first Russian novel to confront western philosophies head-on, which had a great impact on Nietzsche, the first critique of western philosophy. It's a crime novel written by three Russians, a philosopher, a psychologist and a novelist. Dostoevsky was all three in one, so you get to read and learn about dominant philosophies, the inner human psyche and a great crime story. It's a novel that makes you beg a murderer not to confess his gruesome crime. Raskolnikov is one of the most influential protagonists in world literature. That's the magical power of Mr. Dostoevsky. His other novels, Notes from the Underground and Idiot, are also highly recommended. If you have time, then read his magnus opus, Brothers Karamazov. Also, November 11 this year, 2021, will be Dostoevsky's 200th birthday. 1878 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy's most famous novels, War and Peace, often called the greatest novel of all time, but very few people have the time to read it. I haven't read it either, so my choice is his other novel, Anna Karenina, which is somewhat similar to Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. Tolstoy himself called Anna Karenina his only true novel. Russians use the French word roman or romance for a novel, so it's true romance in that sense. It has one of the most quoted first line ever, happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The novel is about Anna, a married woman who has an affair with a rich man. The consequences are disastrous for both. If I'm being perfectly honest, it's about 500 pages longer than it should be, currently about 1000 pages long. It also deals with politics, something Tolstoy loved to write about. If you like something shorter from the grandpa of Russian literature, his short story How Much Land Does a Man Need is a wonderful choice, which I summarized in my other video. 1906, Mother by Maxim Gorky. Gorky was a socialist and supported the USSR's attempt to level the highly unjust and unequal Russian society. As I discussed earlier, the rich Russians were pretty lazy, so Russia was a terrible place for the poor. So the socialist revolution had a massive support among the peasants. Maxim Gorky grew up poor and lived a nomadic life traveling throughout Russia, so he witnessed a lot of poverty among the dispossessed. His most famous novel, Mother, is about a revolutionary factory worker whose husband is a drunkard and son a revolutionary. It celebrates the role a mother plays in supporting her son to become a force for good in society. Gorky, like Dickens and unlike most Russian novelists, wrote about the bitter, harsh lives of the less privileged. Gorky in Russian means bitter and it's a pen name. His real name was Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. His reputation is somewhat tarnished just like the USSR, but he was a great writer. Bulgakov was a doctor just like Chekhov. What is up with doctors? I see a lot of doctors who turn to fiction. Perhaps seeing the gruesome side of human life can be a bit too much and fiction is a good escape, I suppose. Or perhaps practicing medicine gives them a deeper insight that we common folks don't have. Bulgakov was injured and ill, so he gave up medicine to write. He had a love-hate relations with Stalin. He was banned, then saved by the man with a mustache and then banned again. The Master and Margarita was written in 1930s but only published in 1960s. His story is about Satan visiting Moscow, targeting a group of writers. Master is an embittered, gloomy author, just like most Russians. Only kidding. He burns his manuscript after being refused publication, but his mistress Margarita is very optimistic. She joins Satan in his game and by the end they all vanish. Satan and his entourage are like a tornado that brings chaos to Moscow for a few days and then vanishes, taking away both Master and Margarita with him. There might be an allusion to those defecting to the West. Maxim Gorky wrote a book called The City of Yellow Devil. He was referring to New York and the West as a whole that has fallen in love with money too much. In Master and Margarita there is a character called Ponryov, who is based on Maxim Gorky. The novel is considered the first critique of Stalin and a precursor to South American tradition of magic realism. The novel has a talking cat and many bizarre events, akin to a Murakami novel these days. 1962. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, whose name is impossible to spell, lived a hard life, including eight years in Gulag. Not because his name was too difficult to spell, but because he was deemed dangerous for Stalin. He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. No pain, no gain people say. I'm not saying he deserved it, I mean the Gulag experience. He is a controversial writer because some accuse him of writing for a Western audience, as he focused on the ugly side of the USSR. I guess if you can't write for the Russian audience, a writer needs to eat. The novel is about Ivan, accused of spying and sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia. He tries to adjust to his new life and finds meaning in his work instead of complaining too much. It's based on the author's own experience at the camp. One of the horror of reading this novel is lack of any female characters. Although Soviet Union liberated women from their traditional roles in Russia and Central Asia, only 10% of Gulag inmates were women and 90% men. Either women didn't cause troubles or the Soviet leaders just ignored them. These people were used as a free labor to develop the wild west of Siberia, in the same way 2 million Americans inmates are used as cheap labor for the US capitalism to compete with nations like China and Mexico. Freedom is a precious thing we have and that's what the novel is trying to tell us. I hope you enjoyed the video despite the sobering note at the end. Now if you want to win a book of your choice from my Russian shelf, just leave a comment down below. Any comment is fine. I'll select one person randomly and later will ask to choose the book you would like to receive and send a copy to you anywhere in the world. I mean anywhere in the world unless you're a penguin or a polar bear. Спасибо большое. Thank you for watching. Please take a moment to share this among your friends on social media. I'm on a journey to read books and stories from every country on earth. Helps me a lot if you'd like and share this among your friends. Thank you.