What to Read to Understand Russia

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A century and a half after they were writing, authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature. But in an essay we published this week, Anastasia Edel, the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution, and the New Tsar, argues that the rarified society those 19th-century writers depicted offers little help in understanding the brutal war currently being waged in Ukraine. Instead, Edel suggests that readers who want to comprehend Putin’s Russia look to Chevengur, an epic account of the Russian Revolution, written in 1929 by the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and wasn’t widely available there until the late 1980s: Stalin thought it depicted the revolution as unduly savage.

Platonov’s work remained largely unread for much of the rest of the 20th century; though Edel grew up in Russia, she didn’t encounter Chevengur until she moved to the U.S. in the ’90s. The novel, available this month in a new English translation, is long, dense, and strange. But Edel argues that it offers unparalleled insight into the way that dangerous and misguided ideas can stoke violence and warp a nation. As Edel writes, “the ease with which Putin’s Russia accepts and perpetuates brutality ceases to confound once one has witnessed Platonov’s rendering of a country that seems to run on violence.” This week, I emailed Edel and asked her to recommend a few more titles. Our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Maya Chung: For readers who are looking for other novels that might illuminate something about Russian culture, society, or history—especially those that might help them better understand the war in Ukraine—what would you recommend?

Anastasia Edel: The trouble with Russian cultural advice today is that after nearly two years of this atrocious war, many of the novels I once couldn’t live without now seem tainted, false. Luckily, Russia’s body of literature is vast, with plenty of books for the new moment. One of my favorites is Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev. Written between 1969 and 1970 and passed around in tamizdat [banned works that were published outside the Soviet Union and then smuggled back in] until 1989, this postmodernist long poem is dark and hilarious. The plot is simple: A lyrical hero is traveling to his beloved on a local train while drinking himself to death and talking to God, angels, and fellow passengers. It’s a treasure.

Then there’s Evgeny Shvarts’s 1944 fabulist play, The Dragon. Though it was known in the U.S.S.R. as “antifascist,” The Dragon is, in fact, a pretty accurate diagnosis of Russian authoritarianism. In the play, a wandering knight named Lancelot challenges the dragon terrorizing an unnamed kingdom. The play’s 1988 TV adaptation was wildly popular in the U.S.S.R. (it’s available on YouTube with English subtitles).

Another illuminating book is Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog: a superb satirical novella that describes the mentality of the “victorious proletariat,” whose heirs are ruling Russia today. It is dystopian, witty, and, like most of Bulgakov’s works, very readable.

Among the Western works written about Russia, I enjoyed The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes’s take on the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. My family knew Shostakovich (I wrote about it for The New York Review of Books), and I can attest that Barnes masterfully captured the great artist’s torment during Stalin’s Great Terror, the same terror that ruled the lives of millions.

Chung: What about nonfiction titles? Are there any books about modern Russian politics, or even Putin, specifically, that you’ve found particularly useful?

Edel: I would recommend Anna Politkovskaya’s 2004 book, Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, which is excellent, brave, and deeply sad given that Anna was assassinated in 2007.

Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine is a great book that situates Russia’s current war in the historical context, specifically in Ukraine’s centuries-long struggle for independence and an identity that is separate from Russia.  Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014) delves into Putin’s television empire and captures the realities of a country still oscillating between the freedom of the 1990s and Putin’s swelling authoritarianism.

Chung: Though Platonov’s novel can tell us a lot about what we’re seeing in Russia today, it was written almost 100 years ago. Are there any more contemporary titles, either fiction or nonfiction, that come to mind—especially those that, like Chevengur, read as satirical critiques of Russian society?

Edel: In addition to Moscow to the End of the Line, with its many gems of Russian humor, try Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra (1992). Pelevin is a master of the absurd with a knack for grounding the reader in superbly rendered everyday details, which makes for an intense, unsettling read.

Chung: In your story, you mention that writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky feel less relevant to the moment. What—if anything—do you feel like we can still learn from those sorts of authors? Are there any 19th-century novels you hold particularly dear?

Edel: For me, Anton Chekhov’s short stories like “Misery,” “The Student,” “Ward No. 6” still stand. They reflect Russian existential reality and yet are filled with the light of Chekhov’s genius. Whether misery is a good soil for cultivating beauty is a different question.

Or Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, a novella about Russia’s subjugation of the Caucuses in the 19th century. The novel’s protagonist, a fierce local warrior leader, defects to the Russians to save his family. Here Tolstoy’s superb writing is unencumbered by plot or character contortions. It is an honest and thus deeply disturbing work (Tolstoy himself fought on the Russian side in the Caucasian War), published only after his death.

Finally, Astolphe de Custine’s brilliant and prophetic Letters From Russia. A French aristocrat whose family was persecuted during the French Revolution, de Custine wrote his account of traveling to Russia in 1839, during the reign of Nicholas I (who hated the book). The letters peer deeply into the Russian mind and power dynamics. They also zero in on the idea of conquest as Russia’s “secret aspiration” and describe Russians as “a nation of mutes.” Nearly two centuries later, the assessment remains true.

A Vision of Russia as a Country That Runs on Violence

What to Read

Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, by Kieran Setiya

“The trials of middle age have been neglected by philosophers,” writes Setiya, an MIT professor who found himself in the throes of a midlife crisis despite a stable marriage, career, and his relative youth (he was 35). His investigation of the experience, Midlife, is “a work of applied philosophy” that looks a lot like a self-help book. Setiya examines pivotal episodes from the lives of famous thinkers—John Stuart Mill’s nervous breakdown at 20; Virginia Woolf’s ambivalence in her 40s over not having children; Simone de Beauvoir’s sense, at 55, that she had been “swindled”—and extracts concrete lessons. Feeling restless and unfulfilled by a sense of repetition in your life? Setiya advises finding meaning not in telic activities, tasks that can be completed, but in atelic activities such as listening to music, spending time with loved ones, and even thinking about philosophy. Still, not every problem yields a solution: Setiya offers up several strategies for coming to terms with one’s own death and then ruefully admits, “There is no refuting this despair.” But this resigned honesty is part of the book’s charm. You may not end up radically changing what you do on a daily basis, but Midlife will help you recast your regrets and longing for the possibilities of youth into a more affirming vision for the rest of your life.  — Chelsea Leu

From our list: What to read if you want to reinvent yourself

Out Next Week

📚 Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

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