Forum / 2025 Reading List

Jeffrey S. Callico
Feb 24, 09:10pm

I am posting an ongoing list of books I have read so far this year. If anyone would like to do the same on their respective profiles, I'd be interested to check them out.

strannikov
Feb 25, 03:12pm

Jeffrey: This is a fine idea, which our hosts here @ Fictionaut anticipated for us with the template for our respective Author pages (I update my entries there, five at a time, when I've been reading fiction, poetry, drama, or criticism usually, sometimes other titles of interest).

Of the seventeen on your present list, I would be acquainted with the content of only #s 16 and 17. Today I Wrote Nothing I think is the most recent Kharms translation title I've come across. Matvei Yankelevich, tr. and ed. of that volume, translated some of the pieces collected in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky. I have two editions of George Gibian, ed. and tr.--The Man with the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd (Northwestern Univ. Pr.) and Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd (Norton Library/Cornell Univ. Pr.)--identical content, I found, after I'd ordered the second title. My earliest Kharms title remains Incidences (ed. and tr. by Neil Cornwell). I haven't seen the other title you cite, which looks to be more recent than any of these. (I also have a handful of Kharms' children's books, suitably illustrated.)

Kharms most definitely helped steer my tracks into both flash and absurdism (thus my early Fictionaut homage:

http://fictionaut.com/stories/strannikov/the-man-from-oberiu

), and in due course led me to a larger encounter with Velimir Khlebnikov.

You can also find A. Vvedensky, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB/Poets), ed. and tr. by Eugene Ostashevsky w/ addl. trs. by Matvei Yankelevich.

Enjoy your reads!

Jeffrey S. Callico
Feb 26, 12:00pm

Thanks, strannikov -- I will definitely read and comment on your Kharms post. It appears you are as much of a fan as I, even more so.

The collections Russian Absurd and Today I Wrote Nothing include many of the same writings; there are a few additional pieces not featured in the latter, I believe. I do have the OBERIU collection in my Amazon list, as well as the Gibian and Ostashevsky titles you referenced. I would like to find the Kharms play Elizabeth Bam; is it in the Incidences title?

There are two Portable Russian Reader anthologies (19th and 20th centuries respectively) I have been meaning to tackle (both over 600 pages). Gogol's "The Overcoat" (1842) is awaiting my perusal. Although I read The Brothers Karamazov years ago, I sadly have not yet read The Idiot -- shameful, I know. There are several translations of Idiot, and so far I can't decide which one is "the best". I have seen many detractors of Constance Garnet's translations in general (but of course quite a number of the opposite). Any recommendation on this?

Very good to know there is at least one other Kharms reader out there.

strannikov
Feb 26, 03:34pm

Jeffrey: Yes, Elizabeth Bam can be found in either/both of the Gibian titles and in Cornwell's Incidences.

I have the (Viking) Portable Russian Library Nineteenth and Twentieth Century anthologies, also, good surveys.

For Gogol I can recommend the two-volume Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol (ed. by Leonard J. Kent, who revised the older Constance Garnett translations). Garnett wasn't bad for her day, she just cleaned up some of the rougher edges here and there with more polite Victorian usage, I think she put currency references in familiar British terms, et cetera: she translated a lot of Russian lit, though, and with little tweaks here and there, her work seems to hold up. Dead Souls is available in many competent trs. A handy collection of his plays is Gogol: Plays and Selected Writing (Northwestern Univ. Pr.), tr. Milton Ehre and Fruma Gottschalk. Nabokov's critical biography Nikolai Gogol (New Directions pbk.) remains original and insightful.

For The Idiot I have the Pevear/Volokhonsky tr. I remain a big fan of their tr. of Notes from Underground, but even though I have a copy of their tr. of Demons on my shelf, I haven't read it yet (I read it in the David Magarshack tr., I think I recall). If Garnett's tr. has been "revised" by a more recent someone, it's likely inoffensive.

If you ever want to tackle Bely's Petersburg, do begin with the Maguire and Malmstead tr., lots of helpful notes for a difficult but important work. (I think I've gotten at least a third of the way in two or three times.)

Then of course there's Mikhail Bulgakov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Andrei Platonov, without forgetting Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Vladimir Odoevsky. Lots and lots and lots!

The relative proliferation of Kharms translations over the past twenty-five years I think bodes well for his readership.

Jeffrey S. Callico
Feb 26, 04:54pm

Thanks for all these recommendations. I will definitely look into each of them.

Chris Okum
Feb 26, 06:19pm

You two discuss Russian lit and then you don't even mention Vladimir Sorokin or Viktor Pelevin or Dmitry Bykov, the three most important Russian writers of the last 40 years? Okay. '

Jeffrey S. Callico
Feb 26, 06:39pm

As you can clearly see, the title of this thread is 2025 Reading List, not Russian Writers. But thanks for mentioning the writers you evidently think everyone should mention under that heading.

David Ackley
Feb 27, 09:45pm

Going off the top of my head, and an occasionally vague memory without the books in front of me...
Nabokov's lectures on Russian Literature, if it's still in print, is a good if idiosyncratic guide to 19th century Russian Lit. In his biography of Gogol, too, he endorses a translator Bernard Something, who he thought gave the best sense of Gogol's style and humor. Whatever her merits at the time, most modern translations supercede Constant Garnett's and the Pevear/Volokhonsky version of WAR and PEACE is way better.

There are so many great Russian writers of both centuries, missing favorites aren't hard to come up with. I'd toss in Nikolai Leskov, Lermontov, and Pushkin as pretty essential, and of course Chekhov, whose 700+ short stories and five major plays, are a reading course in themselves, and have kept me company for a lot of years. Vassily Grossman's LIFE and FATE is in a lot of people's view, including mine, the best novel in any language of WWII.
Thanks you all, for adding some new names to my catch-up-with-list.

strannikov
Feb 27, 11:24pm

David: good catch, courtesy of Nabokov. The Bernard Guilbert Guerney tr. of Dead Souls (ed. w/tr. rev. by Susanne Fusso) was published by Yale Univ. Pr. in 1996. (Sigh alas alack: another perfectly good Pevear/Volokhonsky translation stands unread on my shelves.)

--and Chris: good recommendations, I'm sure, for which thanks.

One trouble faced by modern and/or contemporary Russian fiction is the lag time with translations. (Sorokin's Wikipedia page bibliography suggests his English translations began appearing only about a decade ago. The Pelevin and Bykov Wikipedia pages don't even list English translations.) My own "Russian decade" ended c. 2000, after which I took up French works, Lucian and Martial, the Iliad, classical Chinese poetry and Japanese poetry and prose, and then World War I era poetry and prose, with Italian stuff here and there and English language works along and along. I only got back to Khlebnikov two or three years ago and to Vvedensky more recently. --Plus, I'm a slow reader.

strannikov
Feb 27, 11:37pm

(Sorokin translations began appearing as early as 2007 and 2008, NYRB has or has had at least two titles. --but also forgot to mention Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, publ. in Russian in 2012, Engl. tr. by Lisa C. Hayden publ. 2015.)
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