The Russian Soul
Six novels that trace one argument across a century: what does a conscience owe, to God, to family, to history? Start with a father-son quarrel over nihilism, end with a Stalingrad epic asking the same question at the scale of a world war.
Fathers and SonsIvan Turgenev · 1862
Lvl 3248ppTurgenev's quarrel between old liberals and young nihilists is the shortest, cleanest door into Russian fiction's great subject: what a generation owes its dead.
Selected StoriesAnton Chekhov · 1899
Lvl 4400ppA breather in miniature: Chekhov compresses in an afternoon what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky need eight hundred pages for.
Anna KareninaLeo Tolstoy · 1878
Lvl 5864ppTolstoy's marriage plot widens into a portrait of a whole society deciding, scene by scene, what it can forgive.
Crime and PunishmentFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
Lvl 6545ppRaskolnikov commits the crime on page sixty; the other five hundred are the punishment: conscience metastasizing in real time.
The Brothers KaramazovFyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Lvl 8824ppDostoevsky's last and largest argument: three brothers, one murdered father, and the fullest case for and against God in fiction.
Life and FateVasily Grossman · 1980
Lvl 7896ppThe 19th-century novel's moral seriousness, inherited and detonated by Stalingrad: Grossman's answer to what happens when the state replaces God.