Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: No Prompt

Since there is still no prompt this week, I opted to feature works of Russian literature, following my previous features of French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese literature. This aligns with my pivot toward European literature, following my initial focus on works of Asian literature for the first half of the year. Without ado, here are works of Russian literature I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: The Captain’s Daughter
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Translator (from Russian): Anthony Briggs
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1836)
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

Pushkin’s restless and creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg’s finely nuanced translations.

Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humor These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman’s secret for success at cards, with bizarre results, in ‘The Queen of Spades’; and in The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.

Title: An Evening With Claire
Author: Gaito Gazdanov
Translator (from Russian): Bryan Karetnyk
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1930)
No. of Pages: 219

Synopsis: 

Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Kolya resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes place, so too does a portrait of lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland.

Written when Gadzanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master’s debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Title: We
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin
Translator (from Russian): Natasha Randall
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2007 (1920)
No. of Pages: 532

Synopsis: 

The citizens of the One State live in a condition of ‘mathematically infallible happiness’. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated. But over the course of his journal D-503 suddenly finds himself caught up in unthinkable and illegal activities – love and rebellion.

Title: Ice
Author: Vladimir Sorokin
Translator (from Russian): Jamey Gambrell
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2007 (2002)
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive.

Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common heart of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The hears of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstacy of true life.

For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice.

What is Ice? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is “the only living Russian author who can be called a classic.”

Title: 2017
Author: Olga Slavnikova
Translator (from Russian): Marian Schwartz
Publisher: Overlook/Duckworth
Publishing Date: 2010 (2006)
No. of Pages: 414

Synopsis: 

In the year 2017 in Russia – exactly 100 years after the revolution – poets and writers are obsolete, class distinctions are painfully sharp, and spirits intervene in the lives of humans from their home high in the mythical Riphean Mountains.

Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out on an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. Young Krylov, a talented gem cutter who Anfilogov had taken under his wing, is seeing off his mentor at the train station when he is drawn to a mysterious stranger who calls herself Tanya. Meanwhile, Anfilogov’s expedition reveals ugly truths about man’s disregard for nature, and the disasters stemming from insatiable greed.

Olga Slavnikova stuns us with this gripping tale of love, murder and obsession, which takes up the mantle of Ruassi’s unrivaled literary heritage.

Title: Pnin
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Synopsis: 

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950’s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.

Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity. (Source: Goodreads)