Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and the Case for Big Books

For nearly two centuries readers all over the world have turned to the great canon of Russian literature. Love and death, war and peace, yes, even crime and punishment; readers across the globe have found in Russian writing a substantial measure of intellectual provocation, aesthetic pleasure, emotional resonance, and personal solace. Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature explores the familiar names of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to connect readers with these experiences.

With a lively, jargon-free style and insightful analyses of thought-provoking texts, this concise volume helps you to understand more fully the pleasure to be found in reading, and re-reading. By identifying what readers seek and find in Russian books-from aesthetically pleasing descriptions to apt psychological renderings-Angela Brintlinger aims to enhance the gratification of reading, giving armchair travelers an excuse to embark on a series of fascinating journeys.

Drawing on Brintlinger’s experiences as a scholar, teacher, and reader of literature, the book is informed by a deep cultural understanding of Russia and Russians. It reveals this through engaging literary meditations that connect Russian literature to the losses, ironies, and ambiguities that define the human condition. Exploring authors’ imagined readers as well as authors themselves, Brintlinger argues that it is these readers, from all over the world, who get to decide what literary works are worth reading. As a bonus, she offers an appendix with more names and titles, familiar and perhaps utterly new-books that show the ways in which Russian literature remains vital today.

Angela Brintlinger is Professor of Slavic Languages and Cultures and Director of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at Ohio State University, USA. Her scholarly titles include books on biography (Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917- 1937, 2000) and war (Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero in the Twentieth Century, 2012), as well as edited volumes about mental illness (Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, 2007), Chekhov (Chekhov for the Twenty-First Century, 2012), food and gender (Seasoned Socialism: Food and Gender in Late Soviet Everyday Life, 2019), and translations (Derzhavin by Vladislav Khodasevich and Russian Cuisine in Exile by Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis). She has also published numerous articles and essays in English and Russian. Brintlinger is also the author of The Manic Bookstore Café, a blog dedicated to linking the present-both the extraordinary and the quotidian-with some of her favorite writers and artworks.