Jesse Hilson’s Reviews > Russian Thinkers > Status Update

I need to read so much, but one piece of writing I need to return to after reading this, is chap 4 of Nabokov’s The Gift, the so called biography of Chernyshevsky, which is so dense and indecipherable — maybe it’ll make more sense now. This is a great book, Berlin was a vivid writer

This is a fascinating book. Berlin’s style (I believe these were all lectures later transcribed and published) is easier to absorb that you might think, given that he’s talking about Russian writers and philosophers and critics. I’m currently in the sections where he’s talking about Vissarion Belinsky, who wrote a famous “Letter to Gogol,” which was read aloud at the Petrashevsky Circle and got Dostoevsky arrested…