Last week’s “Reading Lamp” offered three suggestions for delving into Russian classics that reflect life in pre-communist times, the days of the czars and the aristocracy. This week, I’m continuing the theme of getting to know Russia through its literature by suggesting three novels that will introduce you to Russia’s pre-revolutionary and communist periods.
These modern classics expose the horrors of that political system that some people think is right for America. Read and decide for yourself.
We wonder why any group of people would accept the restrictions of the socialist ideology, but if you understand that Russian society had been locked in a medieval class system for hundreds of years in which the rich “owned” the poor serfs who worked their land so that their masters could live in luxury, perhaps you can understand the appeal of a system that promised to end poverty and make everyone equal—some say “equally miserable.” The system finally collapsed in 1991.
By the time Fyodor Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, revolutionary fever was already brewing. Russians were rightly questioning the iron hand of the upper classes over the masses and the beliefs that had nurtured such an unfair system. However, this novel warns of the effects of movements such as socialism and how they would affect the traditional way of life in Russia.
The central plot is that of a murder mystery involving the homicide of the family’s patriarch, Fyodor Karamazov, the coarse, twice married father of three adult sons.
The sons represent through their actions and speeches the ideas and questions being weighed in Russia at the time: faith and atheism, rationalism and socialism. Dostoevsky saw these ideas becoming popular with Russian youth, but he believed they would destroy the nation’s cultural and spiritual heritage, which they did.
Brothers is worth reading because its plot and ideas are compelling in light of the world’s new fascination with the twin tragedies of socialism and atheism. It is always included in lists of the world’s greatest masterpieces. But again, it’s not for the less mature reader who requires a linear plot, simple themes and a loveable hero.
I read it on my way to Alaska one year, and the cold of the setting prepared me for the cold I would encounter in that US state closest to Russia.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak was published in 1957, but the plot takes place between 1905, before the Russian Revolution, and World War II, after which the Soviets began to force communism over all of Eastern Europe. Through the long, complex love story between Doctor Yuri Zhivago and Lara Guichard, we see Russia before, during and after the revolution.
Though the main element of the plot is a love story, many other events and relationships occur that provide a fascinating panorama of 20th century Russia. Spoiler alert: the great love affair does not end happily— after all, it’s a Russian novel.
Because the novel was deemed anti-communist, the manuscript had to be smuggled out of Russia to be published in Italy. Censors objected to passages they deemed critical of Stalin, collectivization, Stalin’s Great Purge, the Gulag system of forced labor camps, and Zhivago’s concern for the welfare of the individual over the state, which is an anti-communist idea.
Zhivago is a long haul, but avoid the simpler movie version and gird up your loins for a reading of the novel that won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sadly, the Communists threatened Pasternak’s family if he accepted the prize, so he refused it, but the award was made in absentia and still became an embarrassment to the Communists.
The shortest and most readable of the three novels I’m recommending this week is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One critic said, “It’s easy to read and get wrapped up in its 182 pages!”
As the title implies, it is the deceptively simple account of a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukov, who is serving a 10-year sentence in a freezing Siberian labor camp for an act of spying which he didn’t commit. But in the communist system, justice was non-existent and any person could be sentenced for any act and sent to a labor camp for any period of time without recourse.
Little happens in the plot, as little happened in the mind-numbing days of these political prisoners, but much will happen inside you as you cast your reading lamp on this story of unjust suffering in the struggle for human dignity.
Winter is a good time to broaden your reading experience with any of these Russian classics!
