Countdown to Dostoevsky: Post 3 of 3
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment September 1 - December 10, 2024
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
September 1 - December 10, 2024
August 6, 2024
Preliminary Note 3 of 3
I teach in-person courses on Russian literature and comparative literature at the University of lowa (https://asian-slavic.uiowa.edu/people/anna-barker) and started offering online guided readings at the start of the COVID lockdowns. Since April of 2020, I've reached over 7,500 readers on 5 continents and decided to continue sharing my passion for these weighty tomes in perpetuity!!! Here is the list of all the books and authors we covered in the past 4 years:
Spring 2020, Boccaccio, Decameron
Fall 2020, Milton, Paradise Lost
Fall 2020, The Epic of Gilgamesh
Spring 2021, Tolstoy, War and Peace
Fall 2021, Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
Spring 2022, Balzac, Colonel Chabert
Spring 2022, Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Summer 2022, Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Fall 2022, Hugo, Les Misérables
Spring 2023, Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Summer 2023, Lord Byron, pretty much ALL his poetry
Fall 2023, Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Spring 2024, Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev
Summer 2024, Dumas, The Three Musketeers
For our 2024-2028 marathon reading list, please consult my previous post!!!
I wrote the following note in March of 2022, before we embarked on a reading journey through 5 French novels in one year. You may find this information relevant to our current literary marathon project - and learn about the inception of my online reading groups. Enjoy!!!
"Those of you who just found our virtual global reading group - welcome!!! The list of books we have covered so far is quite eclectic - they happen to be some of my absolutely favorite books ever!!! The rule for choosing these masterpieces is pretty simple - they must be old (who can compete with Gilgamesh at 4,000 years - and counting!!!), LONG (Paradise Lost is a 300-PAGE poem - and War and Peace covers over 1300 PAGES and engages over 600 characters!!!), and considered unconquerable by today's standards (a medieval collection of 100 quirky tales written during the Great Plague?!?!?! Brothers Karamazov IN 100 DAYS?!?!?!). BUT WE DID IT!!! And proved to ourselves - and the world!!! - that these books are relevant and relatable, totally thrilling, engrossing, and approachable, and still have the power to seduce and conquer the readers centuries after befuddling and beguiling their first admirers!!!
We laughed and we cried, we marveled at wisdom and cursed at folly, and, in the words of the immortal Coleridge, emerged sadder but wiser after these unforgettable encounters!!! And I am still bewildered by my ability to churn out daily posts for 250 days last year that totaled over 200,000 words... I never thought I had it in me... Thank you, COVID!!!
So after this Herculean effort in 2020 and 2021 - I decided to have FUN - and introduce readers around the globe to my favorite French novels and writers!!! An honest confession - I don't speak French - can read a bit - but as a trilingual speaker of English, Russian, and Hungarian (granted, an odd combination, but there you have it) I simply failed to acquire any other languages. Some of you are asking an honest question - can we trust her on this journey? I don't speak Spanish either - but ADORE Quixote!!! Or Latin - but was elated with Virgil and crushed by Tacitus... And the language of Gilgamesh is a mystery to us all - yet the book stands as a testament to our humanity and vulnerability in the face of life and all its unsolvable complexities...
This statement applies to ALL 5 books we are approaching in the next 12 months. Balzac's Colonel Chabert, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, Hugo's Les Misérables, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary could all be summed up thus: they stand as a testament to our humanity and vulnerability in the face of life and all its unsolvable complexities... Two of these books were my ABSOLUTE favorites when I was a teenager - The Red and the Black and The Count of Monte Cristo. I read them under shady lindens seated on the crumbling ruins of a 16th century castle - in Russian!!! And that's about as magical as it gets for a dreamy kid who didn't figure out how to read till she was 10 (!!!) - and then fell head over heels in love with a world of literary adventures which were thrilling beyond compare!!! My Russian grandmother ADORED French literature - and subscribed to the collected works of all the 19th century greats - from 15-volume sets of BOTH Stendhal and Hugo to a 5-volume set of Flaubert to a 24(!!!)-volume set of Balzac!!! All in Russian - naturally!!! No wonder I never learned French... I had the world of 19th century France unfold in front of me in vivid Russian translations - that transported me to medieval castles far-far away and Mediterranean islands harboring exiled French emperors... Yes, you guessed it, Napoleon lurks in the shadows of all the books we will be reading together!!! Thus the history notes I will be posting this week!!!"
Wow, it was fun to reread this note from JUST TWO YEARS AGO!!! We've covered so much literary ground since!!! And ever so much more to come!!!
Young Girl Reading (1770), by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. One of my favorite reading paintings!!! Enjoy!!!