Father Sergius, by Leo Tolstoy

Very enjoyable and thought provoking story about a young Russian nobleman and military officer who is disillusioned by human weakness, vice, and sin in the world and decides to give up a brilliant military career to become a priest.  He discovers to his chagrin that sin and weakness have a long reach. They continue to bedevil him even as a priest in a big city, then even as a hermit in a remote monastery.  His search for spiritual improvement does not prove fruitless, however, because he realizes what his most insidious fault is when he abandons his hermitage in shame after a serious lapse and visits an old childhood friend in reduced circumstances.     

I suspect this story may have been inspired by Tsar Alexander I, who was rumored to have faked his death and entered a monastery, living the rest of his life under an assumed identity.

Three Questions, by Leo Tolstoy

This story is an excellent cure for two kinds of people: 1. procrastinators, and 2. those who have a tendency to overthink things or who believe there is some grand theory that will solve all problems if only they knew it. The king in this story is searching for knowledge that will help make him a better king when consistently applied. The hermit demonstrates how much more simple life is. There is no grand theory. You just have to take life as it comes in all its variety and do your best to figure out what is right for each situation.

The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy

Probably most people today (and apparently in Tolstoy’s day too) are victims of a particular kind of cognitive dissonance.  They think that they can live a dissolute lifestyle when young, indulging in a series of short-lived relationships where they view their partner as little more than an instrument of pleasure, then do a 180 degree turn on their wedding night to become the perfect, virtuous, considerate spouse who never loses sight of their husband or wife as a full human being just like themselves, to be treated with due respect.  In The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy gives his answer to that proposition: Not. Going. To Happen. 

The protagonist, a wealthy young aristocrat named Pozdnyshev, dreams of the ideal marriage to a virtuous woman, while at the same time living it up with the other debauchees of his social circle.  When he finally does fall in love with a beautiful, virtuous woman and marries her, he finds that the corruption of mind and soul in which he has been marinating himself for years are impossible to get rid of, influencing his behavior and how he thinks about his wife, ultimately bringing them both to tragedy.

Mumu, by Ivan Turgenev

This story made me cry! The Goodreads description says it is about the poverty and brutality of serfdom, but I didn't see anything like that in the story.

While Gerasim, as a serf, is not rich, he lives in comfortable enough circumstances and does not want for any material necessity, and neither do his fellow serfs, whether in the country or city.  Rather, Gerasim's problem is isolation and loneliness, brought about by his disability as a deaf-mute and the indifference of those around him, whether serf or free.

The laundress he courts does not return his affection, and it's only after she has spent a few years married to a drunk does she learn something: There's a difference between a man who tries, however awkwardly, to earn her affection and one to whom she has merely been given as an unsuccessful means to cure bad behavior. Big difference.

Gerasim's affection is only welcomed and returned with joy when he rescues a little dog named Mumu. She is the apple of his eye, his faithful shadow, his sole consolation in this life. She's the only one who appreciates him. An ill timed bark and momentary irritation from the old lady (mistress of the house), however, is enough to lead to Gerasim being forced to give her up too, in the most heart wrenching and irrevocable of ways, on top of everything else he's already given up.

The old lady is not a cruel or malicious woman; she is just thoughtless and self centered. She has been so long accustomed to her serfs' following orders, satisfying her wants that she has ceased to think of them as people. To her they're instruments. By the end of the story, she is surprised to find herself in the same spot as King David was, accused of taking away Uriah's one ewe lamb. (King David was surprised too).

Even the other serfs, who know perfectly well what Mumu means to Gerasim, and how capricious their mistress is, fail him. They could have pleaded his case to her or just helped him keep the dog out of her way until she was in a better mood. Instead, her word is law and they obey without question. They don't put themselves in Gerasim's place any more than she does, and putting themselves out for his sake even a little bit doesn't occur to them.

I can see how this story was good for consciousness raising among the Russian nobility of Turgenev's day toward the serfs. But its lessons still apply to our own time--we modern people who use legality as an excuse to dispense with morality, who are becoming accustomed to think of each other in a utilitarian way as instruments rather than as persons.

First Love, by Ivan Turgenev

Excellently told story about a 16 year old boy's first experience and understanding of love with the seemingly unattainable young lady who has moved in next door... and his unlikely rival.  As with other books by Turgenev, the characters come across as very real such that you can lose yourself in the story.  Really enjoyed it.

Spring Torrents, by Ivan Turgenev

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
--Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

That's what this book is about--those times in a person's life when he stands at a fork in the road.  He must choose only one, and that decision changes his life irrevocably.  A young Russian nobleman has just arrived in Frankfurt on his way home after a grand tour in Italy.  He expects to stay in Frankfurt only a few hours until his next stagecoach arrives.  While walking around the city, he sees a small Italian confectionery shop on a little side street and decides to drop in for a glass of lemonade.  This sets off a series of events that culminate in a choice between a life of happiness or one of misery.

I couldn't stop reading until the end!

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy

This is a short story or novella about a man's last days. It realistically portrays how easy it is to get completely preoccupied in the details of day to day life as if they were all-important...and the shock when something reminds you that one day it will end. Ivan Illich is a moderately well-to-do, very ordinary middle aged lawyer employed somewhere in the government bureaucracy. He has a wife, a grown up daughter, and young son, and until he contracts a serious illness, he was concerned with such things as upward mobility, promotions, office politics, his daughter's engagement, and the details of renovating and moving into a bigger, better apartment. Despite reassurances from the doctors, none of whose treatments help, Illich goes into a slow physical decline and experiences the isolation of the end of life, which he is not in the least prepared for, whose approach he can do nothing about, and which none of his worldly family and friends can understand.

The Lady with the Little Dog, by Anton Chekhov

This is the first Chekhov story I've ever read. He has a spare style--not too much description, dialogue or psychological analysis. The details he does give about the characters and their interactions are suggestive enough so that you can get a really vivid sense of the personalities and what they're thinking out of what he does tell you. This story had an unresolved ending, so it came across as a "slice of life" type sketch rather than a complete story where you know exactly what happened to everyone.

Matryona's House and Other Stories, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This collection includes 6 short stories and about a dozen prose poems, which are basically short sketches of a character or situation that illustrates an idea.  My three favorites among the short stories were <i>Matryona's House</i>, <i>The Right Hand</i>, and <i>An Incident at Krechetovka Station</i>.

<i>Matryona's House</i> is narrated by a schoolteacher who has just arrived to work in the school of a little rural town.  Looking around for lodgings, and preferring peace and quiet, he is directed to the house of a poor elderly widow named Matryona.  She is a simple peasant woman who has worked hard all her life, lives alone in an old-fashioned decrepit house, and over time, the schoolteacher comes to appreciate her qualities: reliability, endurance, common sense, generosity, loyalty, faith in God, and love of life in its many forms, from the lame cat she has adopted to the fig plants she cultivates in her home.  He comes to realize just how rare these qualities are after her death in an accident, when he learns more about her life from how her friends and relatives talk about her--often in ways that showed that they did not understand or appreciate her worth at all.

<i>The Right Hand</i> is a story told by a man who notices a homeless and obviously very sick old veteran being ignored by passersby on the street.  The veteran has traveled a long way in a weakened condition in the hopes of being admitted to a hospital in Tashkent.  The narrator is an ex-prisoner who has gotten in trouble in the past for counter-revolutionary activities, while the old veteran served with distinction as a Red revolutionary, and has the papers to prove it.  The veteran thinks his proof of loyal service to the Communist cause will help him get admitted for treatment in his time of need, but the joke is that the machine-like bureaucracy of the hospital treats both men in exactly the same way, regardless of past service, political views, or state of health: neither can get any service because the admissions office has stopped taking new patients for the day, and mere human considerations are not allowed to take precedence over that ironclad rule.

<i>An Incident at Krechetovka Station</i> is about an official at a busy railway station in wartime whose job it is to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.  One day, a soldier who has somehow got left behind by his transport shows up at the station, and it is up to the official to decide whether or not he is who he says he is and what is to be done with him.  It's a story about the conditions of war, the bureaucracy involved in dealing with the complex logistics of moving massive amounts of people and cargo, and how easily an individual can fall through the cracks to either beat the system or be crushed by it.

The Brothers Karamazov

This big doorstop of a book was one of the longest term residents of my TBR shelf, subjected to endless procrastination, until it became the book of the month for one of the groups I belong to.  I'm sorry I waited so long to read it, because it's a very absorbing book. It's like Dostoyevsky crammed a whole world of people, ideas, and situations into it that just draws you in so that you find yourself reading much bigger chunks than you really had time for that day.

The main plot line is of course the family story of the Karamazovs: Fyodor, the vicious, womanizing father who is found murdered in his home one night, and his four sons Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha, and Smerdyakov, all very different from one another in character and personality, who are suspects.  Along the way we also get to learn about their friends and romantic interests, like the saintly priest Father Zosima, the good hearted but calculating courtesan Grushenka, the proud but self-sacrificing lady Katya, the precocious fatherless boy Kolya, garrulous widow Madame Hohlakov, and the impoverished Snegiryov family.  Dostoyevsky's famous prose poem, "The Grand Inquisitor" is a chapter in this book--presented as a composition of Ivan's.

This is not a tidy novel where all the plot lines are neatly ended and tied up with a bow at the end.  It's a big sprawling thing with a lot of loose ends, like in real life.  But I was interested enough in the characters to wish that Dostoyevsky wrote a sequel, to continue some of their stories.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This is an account of what daily life is like for prisoners in a Siberian labor camp, written by one who knew them only all too well.  Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is a Russian soldier who was not actually guilty of anything other than having been captured by the Germans during the war and held as a POW for some time.  But that's enough to get him convicted as a spy by his own government and sentenced to 10 years.  When we meet him, he is on the 8th year of his sentence.  Through his eyes, we experience the hard conditions of life in the camp, including the cold, the Spartan meals, the penalties inflicted on the newer prisoners when they make mistakes, the way even the smallest bit of luxury is treasured and savored, whether it's a piece of bread saved from breakfast or a little bit of sharp metal that can be used as a knife.  It is a story of endurance and survival and shows how even great hardship and injustice can be borne with dignity.

The Gambler, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I enjoyed this story of life in a 19th century German spa town whose main attraction, besides the medicinal properties of the water, is the casino.  There is a very good old Gregory Peck/Ava Gardner movie based on this story and that's what caused me to want to read the book.  The movie did take liberties with the plot, as the original story does not have much of a plot; it's more like a detailed study of the characters and their lifestyle.

The narrator is a young man named Alexei Ivanovich who is working as a tutor in the family of a dissolute Russian general in reduced circumstances who is waiting for his elderly sick mother in Moscow to die so that he can inherit her wealth and marry a much younger gold digger he met at the casino.  At first, Alexei is a detached observer of the goings-on in the casino, commenting on the various characters and even showing the general's mother how to play roulette when she unexpectedly recovers and turns up at the spa town, to everyone's disappointment.  But despite his awareness of the addictiveness of gambling (after observing how others fall prey to it, including the general's mother), Alexei's love for the general's stepdaughter Polina and his attempts to help her get the money she needs leads him to become a compulsive gambler himself.

Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev

This book gives an illustration of the contrast in ideas and attitudes between older and younger generations, between experience and enthusiasm, between abstract thinking and the ability to recognize the limits of reality.  Also, it also explores how members of the younger generation learn, eventually, to accept reality as it is when it collides with their pet theories.  It is not a plot-heavy novel, but more of a slice of life type of novel, where the author presents various interactions and conversations among the characters during one summer when the sons return home from university.  The book was written in the 1860's, but the clash between the generations is timeless.

I first became interested in Turgenev's work after hearing this talk given by Isaiah Berlin, on Turgenev's short story <i>Fire At Sea</i>.