4 ms·

You have a great list already. I will say of the ones most often recommended I’ve always dislike tostoy as it read to me like contemporary celebrity tabloid ne

You have a great list already. I will say of the ones most often recommended I’ve always dislike tostoy as it read to me like contemporary celebrity tabloid news: who wants to fuck who and how’d they kill themselves, and Nabokov because it always read to me like he was up his own ass (with the exception of pale fire because that character defect plays to his advantage in that work when read as a piece of satire) Recommendations include: Fiction: Gogol, Gorky Nonfiction: Solzhenitsyn Journals/essays: Mandelstam Poetry: Akhmatova, Pushkin, Pasternak

mediaman 6y ago
I'm not nearly as well read as you, but I've really enjoyed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I enjoyed Tolstoy's constant arguing against the Great Man Theory, even if I disagree with aspects of his position. And I love Nabokov, both Lolita and Laughter in the Dark. I've just started reading Checkhov's short stories. They're almost comically dark. I like them.
- russianlitreply 6y ago
  The internet is a deception. Of that list the only one I’ve read everything they’ve written is Akhmatova. Part of my brash delivery is because I’ve read a higher percentage of the total works of the two I deride than the ones I recommend. Mostly because I kept chasing the social dragon that they were ‘great works’. The difference being that I think back and consider insights of what I’ve read from the recommended author’s texts almost daily and only think of the derided authors when someone else inevitably praises them. If you like dark comedy you may like some of the works of Gogol from that list. He probably leans harder into the academic category of ‘magical realism’ when his grounded stories take a turn for the absurd but the absurdities can have a humor of their own.

4 ms·

You have a great list already. I will say of the ones most often recommended I’ve always dislike tostoy as it read to me like contemporary celebrity tabloid ne

by russianlit 6y ago

mediaman 6y ago
I'm not nearly as well read as you, but I've really enjoyed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I enjoyed Tolstoy's constant arguing against the Great Man Theory, even if I disagree with aspects of his position. And I love Nabokov, both Lolita and Laughter in the Dark. I've just started reading Checkhov's short stories. They're almost comically dark. I like them.
- russianlitreply 6y ago
  The internet is a deception. Of that list the only one I’ve read everything they’ve written is Akhmatova. Part of my brash delivery is because I’ve read a higher percentage of the total works of the two I deride than the ones I recommend. Mostly because I kept chasing the social dragon that they were ‘great works’. The difference being that I think back and consider insights of what I’ve read from the recommended author’s texts almost daily and only think of the derided authors when someone else inevitably praises them. If you like dark comedy you may like some of the works of Gogol from that list. He probably leans harder into the academic category of ‘magical realism’ when his grounded stories take a turn for the absurd but the absurdities can have a humor of their own.