Customer Reviews

Twentieth-Century Russian Reader: Revised and Updated Edition (Viking Portable Library)

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The other review (by the reader from New Orleans) appears to refer to the 19th-century volume, not to this the 20th-century volume. Here's the contents list for THIS volume, copied-and-pasted from elsewhere...

"Alyosha the Pot", Leo Tolstoy
"The Bishop", Anton Chekhov
"Recollections of Leo Tolstoy", Maxim Gorky
"Light Breathing", Ivan Bunin
"Time", Nadezhda Teffi
"A Girl Was Singing" "The Stranger", Alexander Blok
from "Petersburg", Andrei Bely
"The Cave", Evgeni Zamyatin
"Nikolai", Velimir Khlebnikov
"Three Things in this World He Loved" "We're No Good at Saying Good-bye" "Dante" "When a Man Dies", "Courage", Anna Akhmatova
"The Potudan River", Andrei Platonov
"Varykino" "Hamlet" "March", Boris Pasternak
"Theodosia" "The Admiralty" "The Thread of Gold Cordial Flowed" "Leningrad" "O Lord, Help Me to Live
Through this Night" "The Last Supper", Osip Mandelstam
from "The Master and Margarita", Mikhail Bulgakov
"My First Goose" "How It was Done in Odessa" My First Fee", Isaac Babel
"Bees and People" from "Before Sunrise", Mikhail Zoshchenko
"Envy", Yuri Olesha
"The Return of Chorb" "The Visit to the Museum", Vladimir Nabokov
"A May Night" "Last Letter", Nadezhda Mandelstam
"Anecdotes About Pushkin's Life" "The Connection", Daniil Kharms
"Prosthetic Appliances" "A Child's Drawings" "Lend-Lease", Varlam Shalamov
"Matryona's Home", Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Pkhentz", Andrei Sinyavsky
"Adam and Eve", Yuri Kazakov
from "Faithful Ruslan", Georgi Vladimov
"A Circle of Friends", Vladimir Voinovich
from "A School for Fools", Sasha Sokolov

I bought this book for a course in Russian short fiction, and two years later I still find myself coming back to it. There are many great examples of Soviet and pre-Soviet writing in this anthology, the complete text of Olesha's novella "Envy", as well as some excerpts from longer works like "The Master and Margarita" and "Dr. Zhivago".

True to the Russian literary tradition, most of the pieces occupy a bizarre liminal space between incredibly funny and incredibly disturbing. The author I'm most grateful for having been introduced to through this volume is Danill Kharms, an absurdist writer from the early Soviet era. His "Anecdotes about Pushkin's Life" mocks the kind of hero worship prevelant in the literary world by presenting a series of ridiculous one-paragraph stories that make little to no sense, but are quite funny.

Other highlights in this book include Zamayatin's (authour of "We") "The Cave", Babel's "My First Goose", Platonov's "The Potudan River", Zoshchenko's bureaucratic allegory "Bees and People", Gorky's "Recollections of Leo Tolstoy", and Shalamov's Gulag horror story "Lend Lease".

This book is well worth getting, and you'll find yourself returning to it over and over again, each time finding something new.

I used this collection for a class in Russian Fiction. Generally it is a fine collection of decent translations, but you could wish for more. It should be noted, a good deal of these texts can be found online, for free. But, for the interested beginner in Russian Literature, this will keep you busy, though I prefer earlier Russian Lit personally.