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Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Russia

                   

History

     Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, Suzanne Massie

     Natasha’s Dance:: a cultural history of Russia, Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991, Orlando Figes

     Russia and the Russians: A History, Geoffrey Hosking

      St Petersburg: a history, The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet, and Music, Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator, Solomon Volkov

     Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales, Sibelan E.S. Forrester (Translation), Jack D. Zipes (Foreword), Helena Goscilo (Contributor), Martin Skoro (Contributor)

     Kandinsky & Old Russia, Weiss

     The Tolstoys: 24 generations of a Russian family, Nikolai Tolstoy

     The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Viv Groskop

     Possessed: adventures with Russian books and the people who read them, Elif Batuman

     Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age, Sara Wheeler

     Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey In Russian History, Rachel Polonsky

     Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Robert K. Massie

      Lenin the Dictator, Victor Sebestyen

     Young Stalin, Court of the Red Czar, Simon Sebag Montefiore

     Gulag: A History, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, 1921-1933, Anne Applebaum

     The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Robert Conquest

     Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy

     Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor

     Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, David Remnick

      Putin’s People, Catherine Belton

     Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lynn Garafola

     The Bolshoi Theatre: History, Opera, Ballet, A. Lushin

     Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky

                   Literature

     20th Century Russian Poetry, Yevtoshenko ed.

     Anna Akmatova and her Circle, Polivanov

The Flute Player, D. M. Thomas

     Dreams of my Russian Summers, Andrei Makine

     Four, Petrushevskaya

     Sleepwalker in a Fog, Tatyana Tolstaya

     Fantastic Stories, Andrei Sinyavski

     Russian Beauty, Viktor Erofeyev

     The Monkey Link, Bitov

     Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol

On Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov

     Selected Stories, Andreyev

     The Created Legend, The Petty Demon, Sologub

     Night Lodging, Gorky

     Lines of Fate, Kharitonov

     Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translators, Eugene Onegin Nabokov translator, Collected Poetry, Alexander Pushkin

 Pushkin: A Biography, T.J. Binyon

      Tales of Chekov, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, Chekov

Anton Chekov, Rayfield

     The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The House of the Dead, Notes From Underground, The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Lectures on Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank

Reading Dostoevsky, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel, Victor Terras

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, by Julian W. Connolly

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, by Rowan Williams

Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, René Girard

A Dostoevsky Dictionary, Richard Chapple

     War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Death of Ivan Ilyich, A Confession, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Leo Tolstoy

The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year, Jay Parini

Tolstoy, Henri Troyat

     Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya)

     Red Cavalry, Tales of Odessa, Isaac Babel

     Envy, Yury Olesha

     Petersburg, The Moscow Eccentric, Andrei Bely

     Stalingrad, Life and Fate, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, Antony Beevor (Editor), Luba Vinogradova (Translator), Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, Alexandra Popoff

     Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev

     Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak

     Heart of a Dog, Diaboliad, Black Snow, The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

     Mother, The Life of a Useless Man, The Lower Depths, The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky, Maxim Gorky

     The Grey House, Mariam Petrosyan

     The Letter Killers Club, The Return of Munchausen, Memories of the Future, Autobiography of a Corpse, That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

     Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov

     Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005 (Edward E. Ericson Jr. Editor), Aleksandr I. Solzenitsyn

Solzenitsyn, D.M. Thomas

     We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

     Ada, Pale Fire, Lectures on Russian Literature, Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness, Brian Boyd

     Roadside Picnic (Theodore Sturgeon Introduction), The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn (Jeff VanderMeer Introduction), Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

     Laurus, The Aviator, Eugene Vodolazkin

     Omon Ra, The Yellow Arrow, Buddha’s Little Finger, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, Victor Pelevin

     The Dream Life of Sukhanov, The Line, Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin

     Day of the Oprichnik, Vladimir Sorokin

     A School for Fools, Between Dog and Wolf, Astrophobia, Sasha Sokolov

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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