Krishnamohan
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MA in English (language), SV University (Graduated 1990)
What are the best Russian novels?
The Russians are the preeminent masters at writing fiction. The list is long and there are many contenders. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky will most certainly make it to the top. War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment are perhaps the greatest. But each one is different. One cannot ignore other great novels like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Mikhail Lermontov’s A hero of our Time gives an extraordinary perspective into life in the Caucasus and the adventures and exploits of the protagonist Pechorin. Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Nobel winning ‘And Quiet flows the Don’ of Mikhail Sholokov are unique in their own way. Modern fiction owes a great deal to the Russians for their intense engagement with the fundamental questions of existence: Truth, morality, virtue, faith, religion and belief. Maxim Gorky’s Mother must be read for the reflection of a epochal movement portrayed through the vision of a Mother who is in a way a symbolic of Mother Russia.