The Great Russian Novel

The prompt imagined friendly aliens with a full spaceship who could take the writings of only four Russian authors home. I was asked to choose for them.

Dear aliens,

I compliment you on your choice of selecting Russian literature among the few artefacts you are able to take back with you to your home planet. I particularly endorse this choice before even recommending the selection of works, for a few important reasons: Russian literature will provide you with some of the most profound, daunting and soul-wrenching works ever produced by our human race. There is no better place for you to attempt to understand the human condition, our condition. I am a firm believer that art, the best, most transcendent and timeless art, is often produced from the position of acute human suffering, a most fundamental experience running through the souls of all the members of our species. And for this reason, my selection of works for you to take on your spaceship will consist of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Petersburg by Andrei Bely, and a few of the Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov. From these works, your entire home planet will be able to recognise what makes us humans remarkable and worth investigating: you will learn about love, passion, suffering, suicide, existential questions, the human condition, and ultimately, perhaps even the meaning of life. Though not complete, this selection of works will cover all the most important aspects of these fundamental questions, from the mundane to the heroic.

I begin by introducing you to what is, in my opinion, the absolute best of all of these writings, perhaps the highest work of literature we humans have to offer: The Brothers Karamazov. In fact, if only one book were allowed on your ship, this would be the one impossible not to take. At its core, this is a book about existentialism, the God question, and the burden and responsibility carried by human free will. Three brothers, Dmitry, Ivan, and Alexey, share the common experience of growing up without the emotional presence of their father, Fyodor Pavlovich. The oldest among them, Dmitry (or Mitya), gets entangled in a monetary and love-related dispute with Fyodor, which draws out of him any love he has left for his elder. Mitya comes close to even murdering his dad, but is able to contain himself and flees with the object of their romantic contention. Meanwhile, Alexey and Ivan are troubled by witnessing the downfall of their family structure. They discuss questions of unnecessary suffering, especially in children, and the compatibility of our death-filled world with the existence of God. Ivan exemplifies his doubts in the episode of “The Grand Inquisitor.” Dear aliens, by itself, this episode should be worth your respect for the capabilities of our species. The monumental question asked is this: if God exists, why has He left His children free to harm one another, why does He not protect the innocent from the evils of our world, why does the burden of choice, impossibly heavy on the soul, fall onto imperfect and flawed humans, and not Him? Alyosha does not know how to answer this with reason and logic. Nobody can. And that is, in my reading, precisely the point, my dear aliens. Instead, the path to human fulfilment has to be one of love, unconditional love, to do good in the world, so as to render it a better place, for both the individual and the collective. And Alyosha, despite not being able to answer with logic, answers with action and traces out this example. There is so much to learn about humans from this book, which is why I am recommending it to you.

There are strikingly similar themes in my second recommendation for you, aliens: Anna Karenina. This book follows the lives of two characters: the homonymic, unhappy, and oppressed wife of a noble bureaucrat, and Levin, a country gentleman whose doubts about the meaning of life bring him close to suicide on several occasions. In fact, the closest similarity to Dostoevsky’s work lies in the salvation of Levin: “if goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence – a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore, goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.” Levin’s troubles with being able to hang onto living and finding some meaning in his existence are resolved by the same ethic adopted by Alyosha. Levin finds harmony in the management of his estate, in his love life with Kitty, and in living. However, Anna is not so fortunate. Her life is marked by profound unhappiness in her marriage. The outlook on her future seems like that of a withered flower. One day, however, her soul is suddenly shaken: she meets Vronsky, a young, rich and attractive man who makes her rediscover happiness. They go to a great deal of trouble together, both come close to death (Anna when giving birth to their child, and Vronsky when attempting to kill himself thinking Anna is doomed). But they are initially able to surpass these obstacles, flee to Italy, and consume their happiness together. However, my dear aliens, happiness is not the same as harmony. This short-termed solution to Anna’s problems proves ineffective. She becomes paranoid, believing Vronsky not to be loyal, and spirals to her inevitable demise: her psyche collapses, and she commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. This book, too, is filled with unforgettable moments and quotes; among them is the one that begins the book: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And it is exactly an unhappy family at the centre of my next recommendation: Petersburg. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov and his son, Nikolai Apollonovich, live under the same roof, but barely even speak to one another. Nikolai’s mother, named Anna Petrovna (to mirror the name of the protagonist of my earlier recommendation), left long ago with a lover for Spain. Nikolai is therefore thrust lonely and without support into a deeply unstable Petersburg, on the brink of revolution and apocalypse. Falling into the orbit of underground societies and without proper deliberation, Nikolai promises to murder his own father, whose dogmatic and autocratic order poses an obstacle to the objectives of revolutionaries. The theme of parricide echoes my first recommended novel by Dostoevsky: at the end of that story, we discover that the identity of the assassin coincides with none other than Smerdyakov, Fyodor’s unrecognised bastard. If with Smerdyakov the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich carries little to no moral consequence to his already broken psyche, in Petersburg Nikolai is deeply troubled by his patricidal promise. He dreams about setting off the ‘sardine box’, the bomb given to him as the murderous weapon, and he is terrified by the thought of a spherical expansion of gases putting an end to his father. In addition, Nikolai is simultaneously tormented by an unrequited love for Sofia Petrovna, whom he haunts masked as a red domino. Sofia is married to Sergei Sergeyevich, who gets brought close to suicide by his wife’s lack of loyalty and attention: “Sergei Sergeyevich crashed down (into death).” But he miscalculates the strength of the rope he attempted to commit suicide with: “And Sergei Sergeyevich arose from death.” In short, this book is an inextricable yarn of interconnected stories, all tied together by an atmosphere of terror and revolution, where treason occurs both between loved ones and between political allies. Dear aliens, it can teach you a great deal about the horrors of our history; perhaps it might even help you prevent the same tragedies from happening on your own planet.

Human tragedy can, however, arise outside of revolutionary circumstances. Sometimes, the most ordinary, mundane life can be just as devastating. It is for this reason that I am recommending the last and final work: Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov. This book provides, in my opinion, a masterful account of what it means to live as an ordinary human, which is perhaps one of the most important takeaways for you, my dear aliens. It will teach you how boredom, societal expectation and lack of love can bring us to desperation and suffering, an inevitable constituent of our human condition. In particular, I want to showcase the stories “Sleepy,” “A Little Game,” and “A Lady With a Little Dog,” which I repute the most significant in this work.

The first of these three focuses on Varka, a caretaker for a child whose crying leaves her unable to sleep. “The delusion takes possession of Varka. She gets up from her stool and walks up and down the room. There is a broad smile on her face and her eyes are unblinking. The thought that in a moment she will be rid of the baby that binds her hand and foot, tickles her with delight … To kill the baby, then sleep, sleep, sleep …” Varka is so oppressed by her reality that her mind completely breaks, similarly to Anna Karenina or Sergei Sergeyevich: “Laughing, winking at the green patch and wagging her finger at it, Varka creeps up to the cradle and bends over the baby. Having smothered it, she lies down quickly on the floor, laughs with joy that now she can sleep, and a minute later is sleeping the sleep of the dead…” This serves as a haunting counterpoint to the grandiose murders of Dostoevsky or Bely; this murder is born out of a pure, exhausting mundanity.

Secondly, “A Little Game” is a profound story about obsession and human desire to toy with emotions. Nadenka is tormented by the narrator’s whispering of the words ‘I love you’. “Soon these words become a habit for Nadenka, like wine or morphine. She cannot live without them.” She cannot tell whether she is really hearing them: “Were those words said or not? Yes or no? Yes or no?” “The same two suspects remain: the wind and I…” Her desperation is compared to an intoxicating drink: “It matters not which cup you drink from, so long as you become intoxicated.” However, it is never revealed why these words were said by the narrator, or why he played such a game. He uses those words just to see a reaction, just to play with Nadenka’s emotions. This shows why the condition of suffering is so inherent in our human species, my dear aliens.

Finally, “A Lady With the Little Dog,” my personal favourite among Chekhov’s works, goes deep into the same thematic scopes of love, passion and unfulfillment analysed in all three of my previous recommendations. Gurov, the protagonist, has a low view of women: “An inferior race!” Similarly to Anna Karenina, he feels unhappy in his marriage and seeks ways of reinvigorating his drive for life: “Such savage manners, such faces! These senseless nights, and such uninteresting unremarkable days! Frenzied card-playing, gluttony, drunkenness, constant talk about the same thing. Useless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one’s time, the best of one’s powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life, some sort of nonsense, and it was impossible to get away or flee, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or prison camp!” One day, however, he meets Anna Sergeevna, who walks ‘a little dog’ around the remote city of Yalta. They fall in love, and immediately recognise the significance of their connection: “Why did she love him so? […] it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband.” However, unlike with both Bely’s and Tolstoy’s Annas, they don’t get to flee to a mediterranean country together and live happily ever after. Their story is interrupted abruptly before it is able to resolve. The solution to their problems is not yet found. Chekhov does not want to give a happy ending to the story precisely because it is from its unresolved contention that the reader can draw its significance. A new life to be started, but how to proceed? It is for the reader to decide. One lesson, however, persists: without love, it is difficult for us humans to find meaning in our existence.

So, my dear aliens, I hope you can find meaningful lessons and inspiration from these monumental works. Perhaps you will be able to understand us humans a little better from these readings, and learn from their many profound lessons. What I am sure about is this: if, like many people before and including me, you appreciate literature in its finest expressions, you will not be disappointed in reading The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Petersburg, and Chekhov’s Short Stories. I leave you with a quote from Chekhov himself:

“And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection.”