Here are 100 books that The Russian Moment in World History fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
Hidden in Plain View makes us see Tolstoy in a completely new light. I find Morson one of the most engaging critics of the Russian classics, and this is perhaps his best and most curmudgeonly argumentative book.
It offers a brilliant reading of War and Peace as an “anti-novel”—as an attack on the form and philosophical suppositions of the “novel” (the word in Russian can also refer to a literary or real-life “romance”).
It follows in the footsteps of the Russian critic-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed the novel as a dialogical, open-ended “anti-genre,” without a fixed form, that cannibalizes all other genres. In War and Peace, this also serves to explain Tolstoy’s attack on history-writing, which shares the false, “closed” narrative presumptions as novel romances.
For decades, the formal peculiarities of War and Peace disturbed Russian and Western critics, who attributed both the anomalous structure and the literary power of the book to Tolstoy's "primitive," unruly genius. Using that critical history as a starting point, this volume recaptures the overwhelming sense of strangeness felt by the work's first readers and thereby illuminates Tolstoy's theoretical and narratological concerns.
The author demonstrates that the formal peculiarities of War and Peace were deliberate, designed to elude what Tolstoy regarded as the falsifying constraints of all narratives, both novelistic and historical. Developing and challenging the ideas of Mikhail…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
Of the very many books I have read about Dostoevsky, this is one of the best, and I return to the author’s ideas again and again. Holquist argues that “Dostoevsky is the inheritor of a particular historical tradition—a tradition of radical doubt about history itself.”
His readings of Dostoevsky’s individual works show how Dostoevsky responded to this challenge, and are brilliant, theoretically sophisticated yet clear and convincingly argued.
What place do Dostoevsky's works occupy in the history of the novel? To answer this question, Michael Holquist focuses on the formal aspects of Dostoevskian narrative.
The author argues that the novel is a genre that constantly seeks its own identity: we still do not know what it is, since the uniqueness of its members defines the class to which it belongs. This anomaly explains the central role of the novel for Russians, perplexed as they were in the nineteenth century by idiosyncrasies that hindered development of a coherent national identity.
Michael Holquist shows that the generic impulse of the…
I have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
Red Square, Black Square is a unique, fragmented “postmodern” critique of Russian avant-garde and revolutionary ideas that bleeds into a deconstruction of Soviet ersatz culture that took its cue from them.
It combines horror and comedy, seriousness and self-satire, and itself partakes of the style and language (as well as the punning wit) of the avant-garde. I found it challenging and fun to read and full of surprises.
This book builds a new vision of the development of Russian revolutionary culture, bringing together fiction, criticism, utopian projects, manifestos, performance and film theory, religious philosophy, and the imaginary space of communism centered around the Mummy of Lenin.
Revolution and modernization are two main issues of the book. The author argues that in Modernism the work of art was conceived as a miniature of the world to come; thus, art was meant to make projects, not master-pieces. He analyzes the genre of the manifesto as a special rhetorical device of modernist discourse and shows how projects of biological and social…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
Gogol is one of the weirdest and most fascinating of Russian writers, whose eccentric comic masterpieces continue to entertain and puzzle us. His identity as a Ukrainian who became a Russian classic and the way this is or isn’t reflected in his works has long been debated.
Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity makes sense of these two contending national components of Gogol’s writing and career. Ilchuk demonstrates the remarkable ways his “hybrid” national identity played out: in his often bizarre language, an uncanny Russian pervaded by Ukrainianisms (made more or less evident in successive, ideologically-motivated editings); in his works’ narrative structure, plot, and theme; and in the author’s odd behavior in society as a colonial “other.”
The book helped me understand the ins and outs of post-colonial theory, which the author presents in a clear and effective way. It also unexpectedly illuminated for me aspects of Russian imperial identity…
One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his national identity. This book presents a completely new assessment of the problem: rather than adopting the predominant "either/or" perspective - wherein Gogol is seen as either Ukrainian or Russian - it shows how his cultural identity was a product of negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values. By examining Gogol's ambivalent self-fashioning, language performance, and textual…
After spending many years as a historian, I could be really negative about humanity. We have done many bad things to each other and the planet, but I don’t think there is a downward trajectory. I don’t believe in fate. My last published works have been about using fear and conspiracy to gain certain ends, but 99% of those were imagined connections, not some sophisticated plans of evil geniuses. The imagined conspiracy came after the actions. So, the books I have listed that I think are excellent are ways out of terrible situations, some of our own making, but often not. I hope you enjoy the books.
This book was absolutely amazing. The author interviewed many Soviet citizens in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s collapse. I loved this book because it showed how people dealt with the massive change of the fall of the Soviet Union.
I also happened to be doing research in the Soviet Union in 1990 and then in 1995. So, I had an idea or two about before and after, but what about the people themselves? It shocked me to learn how many people believed in Stalin and how they thought they were changing the world even as it went far astray.
I also learned in the wonderful stories how they struggled to survive, some more, some less. The stories were heartbreaking but also illuminating and even encouraging.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Wall Street Journal • NPR • Financial Times • Kirkus Reviews
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the…
My wife is a beautiful, intelligent, and determined woman. She took up rock climbing in her forties. She rides a motorcycle on and off-road. She scuba dives with sharks, she’s jumped out of an airplane, and she strapped crampons on her feet when I said we’re climbing a snow-covered mountain. One of my best friends in the world is from Finland. Typical of Finns, and Scandinavians in general, he has a dry wit and keen observations and thoughts which he delivers matter-of-factly in few words. Combining these two with a sprinkling of my own imagination produced Nora Sommer.
Cap Daniels's marvellous character Anya Burinkova takes us all around the Caribbean by both sea and air throughout the series. And like Nora Sommer, she’s full of deep thoughts and observations, but never wastes words.
The former Russian SVR Captain has defected to the US, but to earn the freedom she seeks, the federal government coerces her into using her deadly skill sets against the Russian mob.
Partnered with Special Agent Gwynn Davis, the two build a relationship that is perfectly cultivated throughout the series, and if you’re looking for guns, knives, and explosions, this series does not come up short.
When former Russian SVR Captain Anastasia “Anya” Burinkova defected to the United States, the life she imagined was far from the one she discovered. As the freedom she’s longed for turns to little more than imprisonment, her deadly skill set, forged and honed behind the Iron Curtain, is the only key that can possibly unshackle her.
A late-night vigilante mission under the veil of darkness turns from vendetta to entrapment in an instant. What should’ve been a mission to right decades-old injustices becomes a deadly encounter with federal agents determined to turn the assassin into an indentured servant.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
Sara Wheeler is a prize-winning non-fiction author. Sara is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Contributing Editor of The Literary Review, a Trustee of The London Library, and former chair of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award. She contributes to a wide range of publications in the UK and US and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio. Her five-part series, ‘To Strive, To Seek’, went out on Radio 4, and her book Cherry was made into a television film.
The author was an old fraud but this is a delightful period piece which reveals a good deal, sometimes inadvertently, about the lives of Russians in the benighted Soviet sixties.
I grew up in the United States, completed my undergraduate degree there, and then pursued a doctorate in Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Now, I teach European history at Oxford Brookes University and publish research on Russia and the Soviet Union. I have always been fascinated by revolutions and civil conflicts, especially how people navigate the disruption of stability and normality. How they process fragmentary information, protect themselves, and embrace new ideas to give meaning to their threatened lives is central to my work as a historian. The Russian Revolution and Civil War offer a rich tapestry for exploring these dilemmas.
The collapse of the Russian Empire into revolution took place across a vast landscape, and amid the chaos, countless individuals who might be charitably (naively) described as “colorful” percolated to the surface to become consequential figures in the civil war. One of the most notorious was Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, who fought against the Red Army in East Siberia until his capture and execution.
This book by Willard Sutherland is a biography of Ungern-Sternberg that is also an immensely insightful history of the Russian Empire and a study of the imperial man—the kind of person who was the product of a multiethnic empire, who moved comfortably in a world of many cultures, and who ultimately fought desperately, brutally, and delusionally for a restoration of that lost imperial world.
Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885-1921) was a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close.
In The Baron's Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire's final decades through the arc of the Baron's life, which spanned the vast…
Sören Urbansky was born and raised in East Germany next to the Iron Curtain. Since embarking on an overland journey from Berlin to Beijing after high school, he became hooked by peoples’ lifeways in Northeast Asia. In college, Sören began studying history in earnest and grew intrigued by Russia and China, the world’s largest and most populous countries. He has published widely on this pivotal yet forgotten region. Sören is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments from a global perspective.
Chris Miller has written a well-argued account of Russia’s various attempts to gain great power status in the Asia-Pacific over the five centuries – and its repeated setbacks. Russia’s imperial expansion to Alaska, Hawaii, and California reminds us that Russia’s expansionist dreams often amounted to little. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another example that Putin’s ambitions in the East are restrained by the country’s firm rooting in Europe.
An illuminating account of Russia's attempts-and failures-to achieve great power status in Asia.
Since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by opportunity to the East. Under the tsars, Russians colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii. The Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to Vladivostok. And Stalin looked to Asia as a sphere of influence, hospitable to the spread of Soviet Communism. In Asia and the Pacific lay territory, markets, security, and glory.
But all these expansionist dreams amounted to little. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why, arguing that Russia's ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. With the core…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
I am a Russian academic living in the West and a contributor to both Western and Russian academia. I move between the two and try to build bridges by explaining the two sides’ differences and areas of potential cooperation. I do it in my teaching and research on international politics, which I understand through the lens of culture and politics. Most of my books analyze Russian and Western patterns of thinking formed through history and interaction with each other. I love reading good books about these topics and hope you enjoy my selected list!
Russia has historically connected to Europe as its significant other. This book describes the nature of the country’s identity development through the love-hate relations with European nations and search for recognition by Western other. Sometimes, Russia has sought to borrow Europe’s institutions and values. Other times, it has positioned itself as a great power and a superior system of internal values relative to “corrupt” Europe.
The end of the Soviet system and the transition to the market in Russia, coupled with the inexorable rise of nationalism, brought to the fore the centuries-old debate about Russia's relationship with Europe. In this revised and updated second edition of Russia and the Idea of Europe, Iver Neumann discusses whether the tensions between self-referencing nationalist views and Europe-orientated liberal views can ever be resolved.
Drawing on a wide range of Russian sources, this book retains the broad historical focus of the previous edition and picks up from where the it off in the early 1990s, bringing the discussion fully…
