First of all, belated Happy New Year and
¡feliz año nuevo! to all
Caravana de recuerdos regulars, new visitors, lurkers, and anonymous spammers in that order. Although I was just patting myself on the back for my lack of reading obligations this year (I'm kind of pro-apathy these days), it suddenly occurred to me that it might be nice to have some reading/writing company for the following six BIG DEAL ICONIC RUSSIAN NOVELS I have lined up for the year. For the record, the list is comprised of two rereads of books (
Dead Souls and
The Master and Margarita) I last read eons ago and four crucial
de-Humiliations in waiting. In any event, anybody interested in joining me for a group read of one or more of the titles? If so, please note that I plan on posting about each work during the last three days of the months listed and will link to others' posts at that time. Whether you intend to read along or not, it'd be great to have you join me for the discussions or suggest alternate novels that I should have picked instead.
* I, embarrassingly, have almost no grounding in Russian literature whatsoever.
*Given that almost all of these are obvious titles even for Russian lit beginners, I encourage those who would prefer to read something different to challenge me to a) read any other comparably complex Russian work of your choice with you (note: Dostoevsky's 1880
The Brothers Karamazov and Bely's 1913
Petersburg are just two among many that are calling my name), or b) watch any Russian movie of your choice with you in one of the non-group read months during 2013. We can work out the details later, natch. Also, extra special thanks to Dwight from
A Common Reader for lending me his copy of the BBC's audio adaptation of the Grossman novel. That, in addition to
Dwight's nine posts on Life and Fate, should come in real handy next month.
1. Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate (c. 1960)
end of February
2. Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842)
end of April
3. Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859)
end of June
4. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877)
end of August
5. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (c. 1940)
end of October
6. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955)
end of December
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