Gary Saul Morson | The New York Review of Books

The Prophetic Character of Russian Literature

“Pasternak remarked that ‘a book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!’ Russian writers asked ultimate questions under extreme conditions.”

June 26, 2021

Dostoevsky and His Demons

Three biographers take different approaches to the great writer’s life, which often resembled his most fantastic tales.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 1: In the Beginning, 1821–1845

by Thomas Gaiton Marullo

Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 2: The Gathering Storm, 1846–1847

by Thomas Gaiton Marullo

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

by Alex Christofi

Lectures on Dostoevsky

by Joseph Frank, edited by Marina Brodskaya and Marguerite Frank

July 1, 2021 issue

Casting Pearls Before Repetilovs

The brief, dashing life of Alexander Griboedov, who wrote the most-performed play in the Russian repertory, married a princess, and died during a bloody uprising in Persia.

Woe from Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts

by Alexander Griboedov, translated from the Russian by Betsy Hulick

The Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar

by Yuri Tynianov, translated from the Russian by Susan Causey and edited by Vera Tsareva-Brauner

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar

by Yury Tynyanov, translated from the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush

March 25, 2021 issue

Letter

Betsy Hulick

See for Yourself

May 27, 2021 issue

Gogol’s Incandescent Inanity

A new translation captures the oddity of Russia’s most baffling comic writer.

The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol, translated from the Russian by Susanne Fusso

November 19, 2020 issue

Ilya Repin: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, 1885

Truly Terrible

Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish

by Charles J. Halperin

February 27, 2020 issue

In Search of an Honest Man

Vasily Grossman’s ‘Stalingrad’

Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, edited by Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

by Alexandra Popoff

October 10, 2019 issue

The Right Supper

April 19, 2018 issue

A photograph of Isaac Babel taken by the NKVD after his arrest, circa 1939

The Horror, the Horror

Isaac Babel crafted a style to shock readers into seeing the strangeness before their eyes

The Essential Fictions

by Isaac Babel, edited and translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur

Red Cavalry

by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

Odessa Stories

by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

February 8, 2018 issue

Letter

Gregory Freidin

The Right Supper

April 19, 2018 issue

Playing Cards with Pushkin

May 25, 2017 issue

Alexander Pushkin; painting by Pyotr Konchalovsky, 1932

Will We Ever Pin Down Pushkin?

Strolls with Pushkin

by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated from the Russian by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship

by Alex Beam

Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin

translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

March 23, 2017 issue

Letter

Alexander Dolinin

Playing Cards with Pushkin

May 25, 2017 issue

‘Herzen Against Herzen’; photograph by Sergei Lvovich Levitsky, 1865

Herzen: The Hero of Skeptical Idealism

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

by Aileen M. Kelly

November 24, 2016 issue