We kick off 2025, on Thursday, January 30th (7:00 p.m. Portland time), with the conclusion of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Nobel Prize-winning opus, The Don Flows Home to the Sea (sequel to And Quiet Flows the Don, discussed in November, 2024). Thus culminates a year of reading Soviet masterpieces—Zamlyatin’s We, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Ilf & Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Sholokhov’s 1300-page epic. Prior to that the focus was on 19th-century Russian (“Golden Age”) literature—Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Gogol’s The Nose, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Quite the odyssey!
The PKSCA Book Club meets to discuss Russia-related novels via Zoom on the last Thursday of odd-numbered months (a week earlier in November to avoid conflicting with Thanksgiving) and is open to all for participation. Zoom meeting links as well as information about authors and their novels, plus discussion questions, are accessed by clicking here or on Book Club tab on the website home page menu. Book Club “regulars” include native Russians, non-natives who know some Russian, and Americans with no Russian language background. Thus selections are read and discussed in both Russian and English, though primarily in English for discussions.
It will be a potpourri of Russia-related novels for 2025. Perhaps we go back in time to read Pushkin or Chekhov or Gorky or Akhmatova, but count on 21st-century literature in the mix as well. We may even be joining up with the San Diego-Vladivostok organization for a joint Book Club discussion (thanks to longtime PKSCA and San Diego – Vladivostok Sister City Association member Doug Rider).
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