100 Books Like Shostakovich

Leo Tolstoy’s follow-up project to the massive War and Peace explores the meaning of human existence and the interplay of socio-political events and individual free will through the medium of infatuation, marriage, and love.

It’s also a real page-turner. When she finished it, Elisabeth Elliot called it the greatest book she had ever read, writing that Anna Karenina’s character had held a mirror up to her soul and showed her what her own heart was capable of. 

I came across Early Memoirs when I set off to explore the fiery end of Catherine’s Russia and quickly realized I found a brilliant first-hand account of the dramatic transformation of Russian art and culture in early 20th century. Bronislava (Bronia) Nijinska, a talented dancer and choreographer herself, was the younger sister of Vaslav Nijinsky—the God of Dance—one of the best dancers of all times. In these memoirs she describes their childhood spent with dancer parents touring provincial Russian theatres, their education at the prestigious Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, and their years in the Ballets Russes, the ground-breaking Russian dance company which took Paris by storm in 1906.

Both clear-eyed and passionate about art Nijinska not only offers personal, intimate portraits of Vaslav Nijinsky, Sergey Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, but documents the transformation of Russian ballet from its imperial glory to the breathtaking and… show more.

This classic book, unlike others in the list, is not so much about memory, as a collection of the author’s memories of his childhood and early years.

Nabokov was born into a wealthy family in pre-Revolutionary Russia in 1899. His childhood in St. Petersburg and at the family’s country estate are described in loving detail, as are aspects of later years in England, Germany, and France. Nabokov was one of the great writers of the 20th Century, and the memories are recounted in his glowing and evocative prose.

His writing is nostalgic, but also wryly humorous, aware that many aspects of his early life are gone forever. Many of the chapters first appeared as articles in The New Yorker; all are eminently readable. 

This historical work traces the improbable rise to power of Catherine the Great and her partnership and love affair with Prince Potemkin. Catherine, a German princess, seizes the throne from her mentally-unstable husband and begins to rule the vast empire that is Russia. She is largely responsible for the partition of Poland. Together she and her lover Potemkin conquer Ukraine and Crimea. It hardly needs stating that these territories are at the center of today’s headlines. Thus we learn a great deal about the background of the current war. Their affair was unbridled but it went far beyond sex. It was a marriage of intellects and politics. Ultimately, they agreed to share power, leaving each of them free to take younger lovers. This is another book about a woman operating in a man’s world, wielding power ruthlessly and giving free rein to her sexuality.

In 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is spending every night in a hallway by the elevator, ready for the secret police he’s sure are coming for him. By the end of the novel, he’s publicly celebrated, but the requirements of government approval weigh as heavily on him as government threats. What, both Barnes and Shostakovich himself ask, might his music have been like under different circumstances? “The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.” Barnes’s slim, swift novel offers no easy answers as it examines how moral compromise corrodes a life and deforms that life’s work.

Much like my first pick, this is an incredible novel that has stayed with me for years. It’s another go-to recommendation for me if anyone asks what my all-time favorite WWII novels are. Alexandra is a Russian-born Australian author, and I’m a huge fan of her other books too. Once again, she creates characters that are impossible not to fall in love with, and she’s a natural storyteller who artfully blends historical detail with fiction. 

Svetlana Alliluyeva was Josef Stalin’s daughter. In 1967 she fled to the West bringing this memoir with her. It was published to universal acclaim in the same year. An epistolary memoir it gives remarkable insight into her life growing up in the Kremlin. Haunting, at times lyrical, always affecting, she shows Stalin as something other than the monster we take him to be. She makes no excuses for him but it is salutary to see him portrayed as a father and a human being. An antidote to the all-too-easy dismissal of him as ‘a monster’.

Starks presents us with a marvelous story of the tortured relationship between Soviet society and smoking. On the one hand, Soviet leadership was generally opposed to smoking – both for health and cultural reasons. On the other hand, smoking became associated with both masculinity and the Revolution. Like many a smoker, Soviet society just couldn’t quit, even as the effects of smoking became more and more apparent.

What I love about this book is how Starks takes something omnipresent and disposable – the cigarette – and tells the story of the Soviet Century through it, touching on such a breadth of topics as gender, labor, political, medical, economic, and cultural history. This is a book you just can’t quit.

I loved this three-book series because it is a cold, academic study of one of the world’s greatest psychopaths in action. Understanding how a psychopath would behave when in charge forms a large part of not only Diathesis but also Dissonace, the fourth book in my series, and this does exactly that.

It’s a difficult read emotionally, but that’s more than offset by the examination of how a psychopath, and one recognized as such and as being unfit for any position, manages to rise to the top.

Admittedly, this is neither a cheap book nor a light read (it has 1,364 pages), but it remains a landmark work that no serious scholar of Operation Barbarossa can afford to ignore. As volume 4 of the semi-official German history of the war it concerns mainly German plans, operations, and occupation policies, although some sections do deal with Soviet responses as well as the early contributions of German allies to the invasion. It is the work of six German historians with generally even quality throughout, although the military chapters by Klink and Hoffmann are now somewhat dated. Overall, a work of superb scholarship.