Books to Read During the Great Pause

For this issue, rather than review recent publications (of which there have been few), we asked our editors, advisors, and frequent contributors to share a Russian literary work they felt was particularly apt to read during The Great Pause. Is there a work from the Russian canon you have re-read in this time and want to share? Visit this post online and then share your reading via Facebook.

For Akhmatova, everything mattered. Her rival in a nightclub. To emigrate or stay. A city with a history, a landscape, and a rejected poet. Another poet, his body alive in his writing. And “Requiem,” the poems of witness – a mother’s witness – to a government turning on its people. Akhmatova’s urgency, in her spirited everyday vocabulary, are just what we need right now.

– Joan Neuberger