The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader

by Clarence Brown (Editor)

The life and culture of modern Russia—with all its divergent religious heritages, social backgrounds, and political beliefs—is represented here in a masterfully chosen selection of poetry and prose by its greatest writers.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Short Stories, Classics, Literature, Anthologies

599 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 4, 1985

About the author

Clarence Brown was born in 1929 in Anderson, South Carolina. He is a retired professor of Russian literature and comparative literature from Princeton University. He has written books of criticism and published several books translated from Russian.

Reviews

[Abby Cember · Rating 5 out of 5]

A splendid collection of gems that even Russian majors like me don't know about. I would especially recommend Platonov's "The Potudan River", Olesha's "Envy" and Kazakov's "Adam and Eve", even if you're not going to devour the whole book like I did this summer in between experiments. Clarence Brown did a great job of salvaging the small precious stones from among the rubble (and, to extend the metaphor, the dubiously lauded literary analogs of Brutalist architecture) of Soviet letters. My opinions of Nabokov and especially Solzhenitsyn have been completely redacted, and to my pleasant surprise, sometimes Brown's introductions about the author and their work were more exciting than the selected text itself.

[Tony Laplume · Rating 4 out of 5]

The timing of finally reading this was a little awkward, of course, but Russians have traditionally been among the best writers in the world, and this is a fascinating survey of a century that saw a tremendous transformation not only of a country but its literary heritage. Editor Clarence Brown opts to include an entire short novel, Yuri Olesha’s Envy, an allegorical take (Brown suggests it’s harder than it really is to interpret) on the country in flux. Published in 1985, just a few years before the breakup of the USSR, it’s also a time stamp of the Soviet Union’s waning days, which at that point apparently felt like no end in sight…

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quality collection of stories (in whole and in part) from the great Russian writers of the twentieth century. Brown's commentary is incredibly helpful, aiding both to the reader's understanding of the time the works were written as well as to the general enjoyment of the works themselves.

I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in Russian literature or great literature in general - especially those with a fascination for the Kafkaesque.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read most of this over about four years; for some reason I kept taking Russian courses in college. It's pretty depressing stuff. It's a great collection, though, with short introductions to each author that gives good political and autobiographical information about them.

[orion]

(partly) read for russian lit of the 20th century

read about half for class a long time ago and just recently finished (besides the pasternak excerpts but i’ve just gotta get around to my actual copy of dr zhivago) …. the voinovich and nabokov sections were probably my favorite but honestly i could’ve guessed that going in

[Phil Greaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dipped into this as part of my 'Russia' literary readings and loved it. It has all those major voices alongside those who are less well known outside of Russia (perhaps). There's a good mix of literary and fictional writers, and is useful as a guide to history, such as it's reflected through writing - and how couldn't it be when one thinks about the major upheavals in the Soviet Century? In other words, the historian will find it useful too. It's hard to imagine a better single-volume book to get to grips with some of the 'primary texts', as it were.

I did wonder sometimes if it's worth, say, including an excerpt from novels like 'The Master and Margarita' if you've not read it. What's the point? What can it achieve? But then I read some of Solokov's 'A School for Fools' and understood: it's an introduction, gives you a feel for the author and his work, like a sampler to read more, or ignore it further if it doesn't speak to you, whilst simultaneously suggesting a point or theme.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good selection of twentieth-century literature. Per usual, the most compelling reads were the giants--Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn. But I also discovered some excellent Russian writers with whom I was not familiar. Particularly compelling was the excerpt of Georgi Vladimov's Faithful Ruslan and Nadezhda Mandelstam's extracts about the night her husband Osip was informed on by a friend. Shalamov's Lend-Lease was incredible and I have Kolyma Tales now on my to-read list. And finally, found Evgeni Zamyatin's allegory The Cave stunningly relevant even today--particularly today, as global warming threatens our existence as we know it. There were, however, some snoozers (in my opinion), mostly the authors that the editor openly said were "un-excerptable."

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little uneven. Maybe the editor had favorites because some authors get much more space for no reason I can discern. Still, Nabokov's 'The Return of Chorb' is one of my favorites and there's a small, but decent selection from Isaac Babel who is awesome. This anthology doubled my list of favorite Russian authors when I first read it.

[Brad Cramer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting look into Russian literature shorts. Gives you an appreciation for the Russian mindset at the turn of the century. You have to wonder how many popular authors were actually in favor of communism. Worth the time to read.

[Rachel Zibrat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic selection. My favorite was the novella "Envy" by Yuri Olesha - a dark, deranged, beautiful satire. So many good stories beyond this as well, with only a couple of misses (I wasn't terribly interested in the Isaac Babel).

[Jimgosailing]

What a trove: read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Babel, Nabokov, with new finds like Teffi, Bunin, Zamyatin;

…

Gorky: Recollections of Leo Tolstoy, IV: “There was a priest in Tula who assured me Christ himself was no Jew, though he was the son of the Jewish God and a Jewish mother. This much he admitted, but he still said, ‘He couldn’t have been a Jew.’ I asked him, ‘But then how…?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘That mystery passeth my understanding!’”

“*In the margin of the printed text Gorky wrote: ‘In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should add that I regard religious writing the same way I do artistic writing—the lives of Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed I see as novels in the mode of fantasy.’”

“I think he (Tolstoy) regards Christ as naive and pathetic and although (at times) he admires him, he scarcely feels any love for him. It’s as though he feared that if Christ walked into a Russian village he would be laughed at by the girls.”

“He reminds one of those pilgrims who spend their lives trudging over the earth, leaning on their staff, covering thousands of versts from one monastery to the next, one pile of relics to the next, horribly homeless and strangers to everyone and everything. The world is not for them, nor God either. They pray to Him out of habit, but in their heart of hearts they detest Him: Why does He drive them from one end of the earth to the other, why? People are nothing but stumps, roots, stones in your path—you run up against them and at times they hurt you.”

“He said …’There are moments when a man tells a woman more than she ought to know about him. He tells her and he forgets it, but she remembers.’”

“…he suddenly said, ‘Man endures earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease and every sort of spiritual affliction, but throughout the ages his most tormenting tragedy has been, is today, and forever will be—the tragedy of the bedroom.’”

“He would talk about Dostoevsky’s language more often than any other: ‘His style is inelegant and even deliberately ugly—I’m convinced it was deliberate, just showing off….This (The Idiot) is regarded as a bad book, but the worst thing in it is that Prince Myshkin is an epileptic. If he were in good health, his warm-hearted naïveté and his purity would touch us deeply. But Dostoevsky lacked the courage to make him a healthy. And he didn’t like healthy people, anyway. He was sure that if he himself was sick, the entire world was sick…’”

…

Bunin: “His best works deal with themes familiar to the Southern school of American literature: the decay of the gentry and the degradation of the village.”

…

Nadezhda Teffi: “In one of her feuilletons, a former general surveys the Place de la Concorde, admits that it is, of course, very nice —‘but ke-fer? fer-to-ke?’. This subtly Russianized sigh—‘Que faire?’ became something like the bleak, self-deprecating slogan of the Paris in which noblemen drove taxis and ladies of the manor got themselves up in gypsy garb to serve tea in restaurants and everyone wrote memoirs (which differed, said Teffi, in that some were written by hand, others on the typewriter).”

“…droll portrayal of the empty pretensions, fabricated pedigrees, and eternal gossiping of the émigré community had a distinctly sharp edge…producing many of the classics of the Russian comic story.”

…

Alexander Blok: “Blok is unarguably the greatest of those who called themselves Symbolists. And among the group he is perhaps one of the easiest to understand on a superficial level, for he had but one idée maîtresse—that of a female figure who underwent several metamorphoses…in typical Symbolist fashion, the beautiful lady in question was both a flesh-and-blood woman and also ‘Sophia,’ the female emblem of divine wisdom. His fetching good looks notwithstanding, Blok had scant success with the living prototype (or with any other woman), so the second feminine image to dominate his poetry was that of a whore—depicted in the poem “The Stranger” It is a very ladylike whore, to be sure, and she is, like her respectable sister, a conduit to other worlds.”

“Blok’s masterpiece is, however, resolutely contemporary. ‘The Twelve’ is a long narrative mélange of gutter language and ethereal beauty…As if their number alone were not sufficiently indicative of the apostles, Blok provides in the last lines of the poem the actual figure of Jesus, in his guise as the Man of Sorrows, who is ambiguously either leader or target.
Needless to say, this pleased almost no one.”

…

Andrei Bely: “the student of modern letters must now add Petersburg to the works of Flaubert, Kafka, Proust, and Joyce that it is essential to know.”
(Maguire/Malmstad translation 1978)

…

Evgeni Zamyatin: “The comparison with Vladimir Nabokov is irresistible.”
“We, his masterpiece and a forerunner of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, depicts a facet of the anti utopia where entropy (in social if not physical terms) has reached perfection.”
“The short story ‘The Cave’ reveals Zamyatin’s human sympathy for two helpless and decent old people whose lack of that form of thermal energy supplied by a small iron stove drives them to crime and suicide. As in much of his work, two historical eras are depicted with meaningful simultaneity: The desolate capital of Russia in the starved aftermath of revolution and civil war is painted as though it were an Ice Age habitat of prehuman troglodytes.”

…

Andrei Platonov: The Potudan River - see notes under this title.

P 171

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to read more Russian writers led me to pick this up at the library. Wish there were more women included, but a great selection from Tolstoy to Soviet era writers like Solhensitsyn. Poetry too. Also, helpful biographical information. One beef: Osip Mandelstam's biography never mentions his wife, Nadezhda, while HER biographical section is almost entirely about him, their writing together, and their marriage. What?

[Lachlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent selection, with particularly memorable stories from Babel, Platonov, and Shalamov, not to mention the full text of Olesha's impossible to find Envy! Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and Esenin are surprisingly omitted, while Tolstoy and Chekhov are dragged out of the nineteenth century into the first chapters. I do admit enjoying Gorky's recollections of Tolstoy, however. This collection also does well in bringing attention to lesser known late-soviet authors.

[Caty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just ignore the irritating editorial tone/purple prose/asides in all the biographical summaries.

[Michelle Hallett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb collection which introduced me to some of my favourite writers. My battered copy often travels with me. Standouts include Bulgakov and Shalamov.

[John Braden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection. Will prompt further reading by authors found here. The satire, "Circle of Friends", about Stalin and his sycophants is laugh-out-loud funny and scary at the same time. Recommended.

[Madi Greta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for a module in Russian early 21st Century Lit. Such a wonderfully selected compilation!

[cosmonaut · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent collection—stories are a bit hit or miss, and have little cohesion, but the authors sampled are masterful

[Sophie Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful compilation and introduction to 20th century short-form Russian lit

[Jennifer Alexandrovna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent selection of works, but with a couple of exceptions a little too bite-sized. If collected today (this dates to 1984, with a second edition adding some selections from Bulgakov), it would probably include waayy more authors and works from this era that are/were actually critically acclaimed and popular in Russia/the Soviet Union. Got the vague sense that the editor seems to look down on "official" Soviet literature, and misses a lot of the classics.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good for what it was. Nice introduction to some lesser known Soviet writers. Although, I don't think I particularly liked the extended excepts of longer classical works. I was very much displeased that the editor chose to put the end of Faithful Ruslan in the collection. Ruined the experience if you ever decide to read the full text. I was very pleased with the Solzhenitsyn story though.

[Noelle Dancer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great selection but it could have been more evenly dispersed. A few of the authors, like Chekhov, I could have used more of in place of some of the longer story choices. I also wish the editors personality wasn't so injected in the introductions but oh well, still quite enjoyable.

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the sections on the Soviet writers the best...

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the Russian selections are terrific (as in "Envy"), but others left me cold (no pun intended).

[Lesha Symons Ervin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unusual book(akin to A Clockwork Orange.) Reccomended tor a quick, dreamlike read.

[Anna C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, they apparently haven't updated this thing since the fall of the Soviet Union.

[Elena Sedova]

very good anthology