International Focus: Russian Literature

As part of our appreciation of all things international, to coincide with World Book Day, Scottish Book Trust CEO Marc Lambert surveys some of his favourite Russian authors and books on Russia from the Modernist period:

Non-fiction

The best one volume introduction to Russian Culture is Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes. Beautifully written and easily read, it dramatises the tension between East and West that has animated Russian culture since the reign of Peter the Great, and ranges widely over literature, criticism, art, architecture and music. Figes is also responsible for A People’s Tragedy, a brilliant history of the Russian Revolution, and most recently The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, an astonishing account of the deformed lives Russians were forced to live under Stalin, produced with the help of Memorial, the Russian organisation for Human Rights and victims of Bolshevik repression. Very worryingly The Whisperers has just been denied publication in Russia, while the Memorial offices have just been raided and shut down.

Another towering account of life under Stalin are the two books by Nadezhda Mandelstam - wife of the great poet Osip Mandelstam - Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. These riveting books are a staggering record of one of the darkest moments in history, and a luminous account of culture holding out against tyranny through the awesome sensibility of the poet and his wife. Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia S. Ginzberg is similarly impressive, recounting the author’s experiences of the Gulag and how poetry kept her alive.

Meanwhile The KGB's Literary Archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky is an astonishing round up of what really happened to writers like Isaac Babel, Boris Pilynak and many others at the hands of the secret police, culled by the courageous Shentalinsky from previously secret archives during the first moments of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. This is a must read – there is astonishment on every page. The same must be said of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Stalin’s most terrifying and murderous moment. The great dictator was fond of saying, as he signed off the death lists daily: ‘One death is a tragedy, a thousand a statistic’.

The best one volume account of the vast penal system developed by the Bolsheviks is Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum, a thorough, fascinating and terrifying account which, like The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should be required reading in every Secondary school. Finally, to wrap up this ghoulish section, three other memoirs of imprisonment, each among the greatest expressions of human fortitude you will ever find, and of an incredible literary value too, as well as a note on Simon Montefiore’s recent biographies of Stalin:

My Century by Aleksander Wat – the brilliant Polish poet reflects on the camps and offers one of the greatest accounts of Stalinist psychology there is.

Kolyma Tales by Varlan Shalamov – stupendous writing about this infamous penal peninsula by one of the great literary figures of the age.

A World Apart by Gustav Herling – another towering figure of Polish letters recounts his two years in ‘the house of the dead’. Amazingly, he managed to escape.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Young Stalin by Simon Montefiori form probably the most complete account of one of the greatest and most horrifying dictators of all time. However, Montefiori does not demonise; instead he places Stalin in the context of his time and upbringing, showing us how childhood, Bolshevism and history made the man who would be responsible for at least 25 million deaths. As I wrote in my review of The Court of the Red Tsar: 'A fascinating account of the dictator's reign... Montefiore provides a riveting portrait of the man and his ruling circle... this book gives us an unprecedented glimpse into his intimate life, the inner workings of his government and the relations between the members of his junta, many of whom have remained shadowy figures until now... The result is a much finer and nuanced understanding of the Bolshevik phenomenon than we have had before. Using his sources with great skill, Montefiore has succeeded in placing Stalin and the Bolsheviks in the context of their time'.

Fiction:

There are of course so many great Russian writers of fiction it is difficult to know where to start. I’ll only mention a few. My personal favourite is Mikhail Bulgakov, best known for The Master and Margarita. But don’t stop there – everything he wrote is touched by genius. The Day of The Turbins (also called White Guard) is a great novel of the Russian Civil war, centred on Kiev, his home town. Bulgakov was also a great playwright, and worked closely with Stanislavsky, inventor of Method acting. Bulgakov turned Day of the Turbins into a hugely successful play, which surprisingly enough became Stalin’s favourite play, even though it cast White Russians in a sympathetic light. In his novel Black Snow, Bulgakov mercilessly satirised Stanislavsky, gaining revenge for the many tribulations of working with this difficult man. But his greatest satire is the short novel The Heart of a Dog, which is both hysterically funny and a viscerally damning portrait of the Bolshevik experiment and the chaos it made of people’s lives and thoughts. Also check out The Fatal Eggs, another hilarious satirical fable. You think Marquez invented Magic Realism? Think again.

Boris Pilnyak, Nina Berberova, Yevgeny Zamyatin (who wrote We, a dystopia which influenced Orwell), and Victor Serge are undeservedly lesser known names also worth checking out – and I won’t even mention poetry where it is fair to say that if you haven’t read Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Blok, et al you... well, you really should. But perhaps the greatest novel of the era is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It is the equal of War and Peace in scope, quality and depth. Centring on the Siege of Stalingrad, which Grossman lived through and covered as one of the great reporters of the age, it opens out into a sweeping panorama of life under Stalin, revealing, with great subtlety and psychological depth, the deformity wrought in the lives and psyches of the Russian people of all backgrounds and classes by the Bolshevik system. Most daringly, Grossman compared Bolshevism with Nazism, and found little difference. Completed in 1960 it was naturally confiscated by the secret police, who informed Grossman that it would not be published ‘for at least one hundred years’. Grossman died in 1964, and the novel only made its way to the West in the 1980s. While it is huge, at nearly 900 pages, and features a cast of hundreds, Grossman’s brilliant style and narrative genius makes it a fluent, utterly compelling read.