Initially focusing on nonfiction books with a connection to the Russian Far East, our club then moved on to Russian history and culture in general, followed by masterpieces from the Golden Age of Russian Literature by such 19th-century literary giants as Turgenev, Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Goncharov. For 2024 we switched to 20th-century Soviet masterpieces—Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Zamyatin’s (We), Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. Three of the novels—Master and Margarita, We, and Doctor Zhivago were banned for decades, their authors vilified by the Soviet government…with Solzhenitsyn ending up spending eight years of hard labor in the GULAG (later deported to Germany). Three of the authors won the Nobel Prize for Literature—Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Solzhenitsyn—but only Sholokhov, a loyal supporter of the Soviet government, was allowed to travel to Sweden to accept the honor. Peculiarly, though the team of Ilf & Petrov satirized Soviet ideology, bureaucracy, and society in Twelve Chairs, Stalin not only didn’t have them arrested, but permitted publication (albeit with an agreement from the authors that they travel to the U.S. to gather information and take photos for a satire about America during the Great Depression). What the future holds for Russian literature under Putin is anyone’s guess.
Book Club meetings are held on the last Thursday evening of odd-numbered months, but our discussion at the end of November will be held a week earlier in order not to conflict with Thanksgiving. We are currently experimenting with reading two novels concurrently, one short in length—Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (to be discussed at the end of September)—and the other longer in length—Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (to be discussed at the end of November). A portion of the November meeting will be devoted to concluding our discussion on Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. For an overview of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Quiet Flows the Don, as well as information about their authors—plus a link to discussion questions for both novels and Zoom links to the September & November meetings—click on “Book Club” at the top of the website home page.