Inspiring Older Readers
Bullied by the Russians in the corner
Sometimes I take a look at my ‘to be read’ pile and ignore it in favour of a freestyling trawl through the shelves looking for anything that catches my eye. It’s usually at times like this that I stumble on The Russians. Safely tucked away together and hidden from sight by a less intimidating row of more congenial novels they sit, brooding away, waiting to be selected and always being passed over. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Turgenev – there they sit like monstrous brutes, biblio-bullies jeering at me for selecting something more delicate, more whimsical from the shelf in front.
How did it come to this? Why, as I’ve got older, has it become more difficult to plunge into the works of these Russian masters? It’s not just their size – and many of them are really formidable – nor is it the fact that the Russian tradition of giving everyone the most hellish and mystifyingly complex combination of names is like entering a linguistic labyrinth. It’s more to do with the sense of physical and spiritual austerity these authors conjure-up; just by opening the pages you feel the winter wind blowing across the vast Russian literary landscape bending the people into gnarled and flinty elemental creatures.
Interestingly enough, those are the very characteristics that actually drew me to them as a younger reader in my early twenties. The sheer heroic scale of all things Russian felt like the reading equivalent of exploring the immense wilderness of the tundra. This kind of exploration of inhospitable environments is probably a young man’s thing and now as I approach my dotage the thought of setting off across the metaphorical wastes of the Steppes just fills me with a sort of doleful lethargy.
I’m also genuinely awestruck by the way the lives that these Russian authors have led has bled across into their books. You’re not going to find any primping, posturing, over-fed, luxury-addicted milksops here. This is man stuff and not an Aga-saga to be found. I remember being impressed by an article I read in The Guardian written by Daniel Kalder back in 2010 when he too noted just how hard (in every sense) Russian authors can be:
Many years ago a friend made one of the most perceptive comments I have ever heard about Russian writers. "Yeah," he said, "they're profound and all that. But they're also incredibly hard. I mean, there's Pushkin: died in a duel. Lermontov: died in a duel. Tolstoy: fought in the Caucasus. Dostoevsky: sentenced to death, exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Solzhenitsyn: fought in the second world war, sent to the Gulag, survived cancer, defied the USSR …"
"Don't forget Griboyedov," I added. "Torn to pieces by angry Persians after he tried to save an Armenian eunuch. And Varlam Shalamov: Seventeen years in the Gulag."
"Yeah – and what have English authors done? Dickens? Who did he fight?"
So maybe the shelf of Russians waiting to be read again disturb me so much because they remind me of just how soft I’ve become in my reading. I need a strategy that won’t mean that I’ve got to make too much of a commitment and perhaps I can find my way back into them by taking the relatively gentle path of short stories? I’ve never read Gorky or Gogol for example – could one of them be the key?
I’ll let you know if my Russian odyssey bears fruit.
Terry Potter
February 2018