A Taste of Imperial Russian Literature

As I helped compile the listing of Imperial Russian Literature for the Classics Circuit a few months ago (found here), I found my TBR list growing exponentially: there are so many authors I want to read that I just don’t know when I’ll get to them all. Through my searches at the library and at Amazon.com, I discovered a volume by Penguin Viking: The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader. It was just what I was looking for: stories, novellas, and poems from twenty different Imperial Russian writers.

I intended to read the entire volume for the Circuit (about 600 pages), but I’m finding that summer living has made reading time scarce. Even reading half the volume, though, makes for quite a long post here, so I hope you don’t mind. I read the authors I had never read before and share my thoughts below: Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Sergey Akaskov, Karolina Pavlova, and Ivan Goncharov. Some of them are writers that I intend to revisit. Other writers were a good read, but I’ll probably not revisit them.

According to Merriam Webster, superfluous means “exceeding what is sufficient or necessary: extra; not needed: unnecessary.” As I read the collection of stories, poems, and novellas, I couldn’t help thinking of that word. Ivan Turgenev wrote the novella “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” in 1850, which focused on one of the gentry who lived a rather aimless life. I haven’t read the novella (it is not in my Reader), but I read Mel u’s post about it early in the Classics Circuit Tour. As I read my selections, I kept thinking about how each story or poem seemed to discuss one of these “unnecessary” people in Russian society. Reading Russian literature in that light is quite depressing, yet the stories are, for the most part, wonderfully drawn together. Continue reading »

Great Short Stories by American Women + Thoughts on A Few Other Great Stories

I adopted May as A Short Story a Day in May (which was also, apparently, made “official” by someone important I’d never heard of). I started off on a roll: I read a short story every day for almost three weeks. Then, by the last week of the month, I realized that I was honestly bored with reading a short story every day. I wasn’t finding the right ones, I guess. I am thinking that for me, short stories are best appreciated a few here and there, not a huge number in one month.

The first part of the month was taken up by reading a Dover Thrift anthology of stories by American Women. Edited by Candace Ward, the volume had thirteen stories, one of which I skipped because I couldn’t get into it. (That story was “Life in the Iron-Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis. The blurb about it compared it to Emile Zola, and that was enough to turn me against it. It also started quite slowly.) The anthology has (mostly) public domain works in it; I’ve found an online link where available. Continue reading »

Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Yesterday began Black History Month in the USA! The Harlem Renaissance-themed Classics Circuit began yesterday as well, and I hope you follow along as bloggers unite in reading classic works by African-Americans.

Although this post is not for the Circuit, in preparing for that Classics Circuit, I did a lot of preliminary reading about the era and I really wanted to dabble in the poetry. I meant to post this weeks ago, but it never happened and now it’s already February! It works well, though, because I’d like to write at least one post about African-American literature each week in February.

In my library shelf searches, I could not find a comprehensive collection of Countee Cullen and Claude McKay and any of the other, less well known African-American poets of the Renaissance. I still haven’t really found a comprehensive Harlem Renaissance poetry anthology at my library, but I did find an out-of-print 1941 anthology of poetry for children that met my needs. (Thank goodness for my library’s reciprocal borrowing program with 15 other libraries!). This allowed me to read a number of different poets who were writing during the Renaissance and before.

Although Golden Slippers was edited and prepared for a “young readers” audience, it’s applicable to all, and while the poetry in it is not my favorite, it seems to have an important overview of some of the poets of the near-contemporary age to the Renaissance. Researching online, I found more poems by each poet. I also focused on Langston Hughes a little bit in the past few weeks. Continue reading »

The Norton Introduction to Poetry + My Introduction to Poetry

I was about 16 or 17 before I “got” the point of poetry. My mother (an English grad student) had invited me to come to an English conference with her, and the poet Andrew Hudgins spoke. I don’t know what he said or which of his poems he shared, but I suddenly realized that poetry can be a beautiful part of a self, that a poet is able to express feelings in words, feelings that I never thought expressible.

It was shortly after that that I bought the Norton Introduction to Poetry (3rd edition, 1984; the link is for the 9th edition, 2006) for a few dollars at a used bookstore. I’ve since browsed through it numerous times and always enjoyed the tutorial and anthology aspects of it: when I’m in the mood to think about poetry, it’s a nice fall back. In the last few months, I took the time to actually read most of it. (I think I skipped a total of about 50 pages in the 500 page book, mostly excerpts from long poems by Milton, Eliot, and Tennyson that I plan to read in full.) Continue reading »

Poetry Friday: Christmas Poems

I mentioned previously that I love the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series. So I ordered myself the volume Everyman’s volume of Christmas Poems in honor of the holiday. (Thank goodness for Amazon’s Marketplace where I could get it for half price!). I really enjoyed a retreat in to poetry about my favorite holiday and season, Christmas.

Christmas Poems has an eclectic mix of modern and old poems, from John Milton to W.H. Auden and Chinua Achebe. Continue reading »