A Prolegomena Toward Any Future Russian Literary Dialectics

in which the story is told of a certain worthy personage,

his intellectual games and the ephemerality of existence

—Andrei Bely, Petersburg, 1916

I am an obsessed man...I am a possessed man—to  paraphrase, mistranslate, or simply rip off Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. My obsession is Russian literature.

There’s no special reason for this obsession. I’m a middle-aged, painfully normal, seemingly well-adjusted honky dude from Minneapolis, of all thrilling places. I claim no Russian ancestry, although I like ice-cold vodka and piroshkis, but not to an inordinate degree. I don’t pretend to be sophisticated, urbane, or even particularly smart: my tastes are rather boringly proletarian, from puppy dogs to rockabilly music, swashbucklers (Sabatini! Dumas!) to Westerns (The Searchers!). I’ve never misplaced my nose, run into the devil’s kitty cat in a dark alley, or plotted a good ax murder.

Perry Mason in Petersburg

Russian horse opera

No, my obsession with Russian literature is not a mid-life crisis (although that could be entertaining—and perhaps undiagnosticable). In fact, I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know about Russian literature. That’s because I began reading all the greats when I was about seven years old, thanks to my dad’s collection of Classics Illustrated comicbooks, which included Gogol’s “The Cossack Chief” (Taras Bulba, #164) and Dostoyevksy’s Crime and Punishment (#89), not to mention Homer, Eugene Sue, and even some good solid horse operas. Call it a solid schooling at the College of Comic Book Knowledge.

But it wasn’t until much later that my obsession truly took hold due to a true college class in Dostoyevsky taught by an impassioned and inspired Russian professor. Now, even today, reading Pushkin or Pilnyak gives me a thrill I can’t quite describe. Or understand.

Thus, this blog will be an opportunity to try to get to the bottom of this obsession, blab about my favorite books and authors, and simply ramble on. And on. It will not be critical (hence, we’ll not bother mentioning Elif Batuman’s The Possessed ever again). And I will no doubt toss out numerous broad, silly, untenable, and downright wrong theories about something I don’t really know that much about.

So, let us begin.