Anna’s Thinking Cap Reading Marathon - Spring 2024 - 100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels - Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev
100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels - Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev
Anna’s Thinking Cap Reading Marathon
100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels - Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev
February 20 - May 31, 2024
One final re-post from the start of this tutorial - for the readers who joined us recently!!! Enjoy!!!
Dear literature enthusiasts,
Welcome to Anna’s Thinking Cap - a place where timeless classics are read, studied, and discussed on the intersection of literature, history, and culture. So far, I offered 12 online tutorials since 2020 - and it is high time to bring the lucky 13th to Substack. We are embarking on a 5-year exploration of the novels of Dostoevsky and eventually, in 2028, of Tolstoy, in commemoration of his bicentennial. In the spring of 2024, we will celebrate the novels that stood at the inception of all the brooding, alienated, dejected and often irredeemable characters we will encounter during our journey.
2024 marks the 250th anniversary of the oddest little novel in literary history. In 1774, at the age of 24, the future author of the immortal Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), created his haunting and infinitely consequential The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers). Equally mocked and imitated, it was the novel that, along with Byron’s Childe Harold, inspired countless 19th century literary heroes filled with pride, suffering from dejection, and yearning for the infinitely illusive and tragically unrealizable ideal… Napoleon took this slender novel to Egypt with him and read it over and over again while pining for his Josephine…
MUST READ in February and March of 2024 - the 250th anniversary months of the novel’s creation!!! Needless to say, we will listen to the 1887 Jules Massenet opera Werther after we conclude this devastating tale of suffocating and obsessive passion…
April 2024 belongs to the commemoration of Byron’s 200th anniversary of death at the age of 36 on April 19 in Missolonghi, Greece…
In preparation to tackling the Dostoevsky Great Five (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and Brothers Karamazov), will read two of the most Byronic Russian novels ever created - Pushkin’s Eugène Onegin (and listen to the Tchaikovsky opera) and Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. Pushkin’s Onegin, this “Moscovite in Harold’s cloak,” and Lermontov’s Pechorin are quintessential bad boys, absolute scoundrels, merciless duelists, and seductive lovers - everything that is essential in a Byronic hero!!!
Thus, the title of this spring tutorial - 100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels!!! OR Dueling 101 - since all 4 novels we will be reading contain references to duels or dueling practices…
And what Russian scoundrel list would be complete without Turgenev’s Bazarov, the self-proclaimed nihilist hero of Fathers and Sons?!?!?! We will read this novel in May - not only to complete our tour of dueling Russian scoundrels - but because Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which we will read in early September, prior to Crime and Punishment, was directly inspired by Fathers and Sons.
And so, if you are ready to have heaps of fun with literature - join our group of literature enthusiasts - and stay tuned for the next post!!!
We are using Ilya Repin's 1899 illustration for Alexander Pushkin’s (1799-1837) novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1825-1832) as the main image for this tutorial.
I'm so excited for this!!!