Which Russian books were voted onto The Guardian's new top 100 list?
Like any list of the best books ever, ‘The Guardian’ newspaper’s Top 100 didn't lack Russian authors. Below, we’ve detailed the books that were included in the rating. And also how the newspaper explained their choice.
No. 91: ‘Life and Fate’ by Vasily Grossman, 1980
“Ukrainian Jewish journalist Grossman was a witness to the battle of Stalingrad and the Nazi extermination camps; written in 1959, his epic of life on the Eastern Front during World War II, suppressed by the regime and smuggled to the west after his death, is widely seen as the Soviet ‘War and Peace’.”
The book became widely known in the English-speaking world after a brilliant translation by Robert Chandler.
No. 69: ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
“In a novel that brilliantly exposes the gulf between sterile theorising and real human relations, an impoverished former student named Raskolnikov decides to commit a murder to prove a point – that some people are of no consequence, while others are so extraordinary that moral laws don’t apply to them. Unfortunately, his conscience doesn’t cooperate. Racked by guilt, haunted by bad dreams and encouraged by the woman he comes to love, he is driven to confess.”
No. 66: ‘The Master and Margarita’ by Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966-67
“In this satire of the Soviet Union <…> the devil and his entourage – including a vampire and an enormous black cat – cause mayhem in officially atheistic Moscow. Like his character the Master, who is writing a novel about Pontius Pilate and fearing censorship and persecution by the authorities, Bulgakov burned the first manuscript in 1930; the darkly playful fable of good and evil went on to inspire the Rolling Stones’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.”
No. 29: ‘Pale Fire’ by Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
“A metafictional delight presenting a 999-line poem by a poet called John Shade, which is subverted by the commentary appended by his neighbour and colleague. Critics have argued endlessly over how to read this slyly witty meditation on meaning and madness.”
Though the book was originally written in English, not Russian, we’ll add that Nabokov came up with the idea while translating Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ and writing a four-volume comment to it.
No. 28: ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1879-80
“Dostoevsky’s final novel, in which the murder of a cruel landowner throws suspicion on to his sons, tackles the biggest questions: good, evil, free will, original sin and the possibility of human redemption, all explored against the backdrop of a Russia in the grip of seismic social change. Both Einstein and Freud thought it the best novel ever written.”
No. 25: ‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
“The confession of paedophile Humbert Humbert, literature’s most dazzlingly unreliable narrator, is an endlessly controversial high-wire act. The first print run was just 5,000 copies. It has now sold more than 50 million copies.”
No. 7: ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy, 1869
“Combining love, tragedy, philosophy and a history of the Napoleonic wars, Tolstoy claimed his four-volume epic was ‘not a novel’; Dostoevsky disagreed, describing it as the masterpiece of Russian literature.”
No. 6: ‘Anna Karenina’ by Leo Tolstoy, 1878
“While Tolstoy himself found the novel to be “beastly”, readers ever since have been drawn in by the depth of emotion and the breadth of his depiction of Russian society; William Faulkner declared it the greatest novel ever written.”
Truly lots of world literature and arts celebrities consider this book as their favorite.