Russians

With all the drama about Russians in the news for the past couple of YEARS now, you'd think that more people would be interested in Russia as a topic in itself, instead of just obsessing about complicity in illegal acts and whatnot. Russian literature is, in my humble opinion, one of the finest things in the world. I don't know why it appeals to me so strongly-- I'm probably not insightful enough to connect those dots yet. But the humanism of their literature from the 1800s is immense. The realism, the characters, the passion . . . it's all there, all somehow drawn through the Romantic movement and then refined down. Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy . . . it's just amazing. I want to take Russian novels and shove them into people's hands, I'm that enthusiastic about them lately. It's probably not helping that my other reading at the current time is Joyce, whom I loathe, and Anthony Powell, who was, I think, rightfully mostly forgotten about except for his inclusion on the 100 Novels list (ugh, so many bad books on that list.) To go from Powell's bland and distant commentary and ridiculous revolving cast of characters to the grand frustrated emotions in "Fathers and Sons" is like leaving the freezer and going into the sun.

tl;dr Russian novels rock.