Sawfish asked, "I'm going to try giving the Russians a go. Can you suggest a place to start?"
When I taught a course in Russian lit in translation, I assigned a short story and a novella at the start, giving a sense of the land. These were
1.Turgenev's "Bezhin Meadow"
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2.Chekhov's "The Steppe"
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Long works from which I selected assignments included the following (not all of them in one semester!), always in the translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky:
Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina
If one is wary of tackling either of those two long novels, I'd recommend the novel The Coassacks and the novellas "Father Sergius," "The Devil," "Master and Man," etc.
Dostoevsky: Demons, The Brothers Karamazov
I might also have chosen Crime and Punishment once.
Gogol: Dead Souls -- I used the translation of Pevear & Volokhonsky, but I understand that the Guerney & Fusso version (Yale) is regarded as superior by at least one authority; that is the one I will almost certainly read next time. Despite the title, this is, in fact, a masterpiece of comic writing. It is one of very few literary works that has had me also weeping and gasping with mirth! When I assigned Gogol, I believe he came before Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.
I typically ended the course with Solovyov's "Tale of the Antichrist," from Three Conversations, which is a particularly good thing to read after the Dostoevsky novel. Solovyov was something of a disciple of Dostoevsky, and his "Tale" is interesting as a sort of companion piece to Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov.
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That's not the translation I used, but it's what I found online.
For a modern Russian work, I would assign Eugene Vodoloazkin's recent fantasy/historical novel Laurus.
Other Russian works I can recommend include Aksakov's A Russian Gentleman and (perhaps even more) Years of Childhood, as translated by Duff; Paustovsky's Story of a Life: Childhood and Schooldays, translated by Harari and Duncan; Skrebitski's In the Forest and on the Marsh; Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper.
I warmly recommend these Russian movies: Solaris; Russian Ark; The Return; The Island (Ostrov).
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There are others I like but these are ones to start with.
I love Serge Schmemann's book Echoes of a Native Land. He is an award-winning American author who went to Russia to seek his roots.
I rarely recommend TV or cinematic adaptations, but I do like the circa 1978 British miniseries of Crime and Punishment with John Hurt as Raskolnikov. Hurt is actually too old for the part but aside from that is pretty great. The adaptation isn't 100% faithful but it's worth watching.
There are several Russian miniseries that are good to watch after you have read the books. The subtitles can be pretty bad.
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Finally, I loved Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia.
Dale
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 23 Jan 21 | 10:29AM by Dale Nelson.