Reflections on a Year of Reading Russian Literature
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
I Want to Live by Nina Lugovskaya
Alix and Nicky by Virginia Rounding
        Reading through the wide range of Russian literature I chose this year has shown me a great number of aspects of the country, such as its famous history and the thoughts and opinions of some of its very insightful authors. It's certainly a different world than home, and its past shows a great number of hardships and dark, cold times. It's literature is rich in absurdity and impact-fulness, leaving you both confused and somehow profoundly touched at the same time. Each of the stories I read had a passionate reason to exist, some to warn the people of the world, and some to reflect on our own inner-workings. Some common themes I picked up on, especially in the two sci-fi stories I read, were the human mind and what happens at its core, when you break it down. The past was also a common theme in that the reader would be taken back in time to look at the mistakes and stories of years ago to learn and understand the present and the future. The authors all had drastically different styles, but you can definitely pick up on recurring elements such as eeriness or even love in several different cases.
        Heart of a Dog taught me not only about humanity but also about the morality of animal experimentation. Seeing how far the characters went in this story irked me in a strange way, I felt very uneasy throughout the story. But I definitely took something from all of that, something that's hard to describe but in a way it feels like I had my own morality tested. I saw what they did to the dog in the story, and it peaked my interest despite how arguably wrong it all was. I don't know if I took a solid lesson from it, but I saw a lot of myself and people in general in it.
        We had a much deeper effect on me, showing me what the future may be like one day in a world where we give up everything and lose our will to the powerful. Just like 1984, it taught me a great deal about enjoying freedom and not taking our rights for granted. It was a powerful story with a tragic ending where the protagonist had freedom right in front of him for a glimpse of a moment and had it taken away. It made me wish for something like this to never happen to us as people.
        In I Want to Live, I was shown what it was like for a teenage girl to live in 1930s-1940s Russia, seeing her family and friends be taken away for good, and even having her own life be at great risk almost all of the time. It put things into a new perspective for me, showing me that not only am I extremely lucky to be as comfortable in life as I can be, but also that even during a terrible crisis people are still people. Even teenagers still deal with the same emotional issues during times like that, even having all of that on top of what was going on only makes it all much worse. This story taught me not only about that, but just in general what it feels like to deal with it all.
       Lastly, Alix and Nicky showed me not only a great deal about Russian history, but also about the difficulties of ruling over a collapsing and changing country. In the end, the both of them were overthrown and killed due to not being able to handle leadership and no longer being needed by the new government that was forming. This story taught me that even the most rich and powerful leaders are flawed, and even they must deal with terrible circumstances such as Alix and Nicky's son who had several serious health issues. It showed me the mistakes that may lead to one's own demise and how sometimes, despite good intentions, you can still be overthrown by the more powerful.
        The most I can take away from this project is that while I didn't enjoy it, I did actually find some substance to it. Reading through these different tales of fiction and nonfiction showed me a lot about myself and unsurprisingly Russia. There were times where I truly did have my interest peaked, and those were the times I'll remember from all of this. I can't say I'm entirely ecstatic that I went through all of it, but I can say that I'm glad that I was able to pick out some pretty great stories and learn about another place in the world that isn't my own. Mostly, I learned that I really do enjoy fiction more than nonfiction, there's something about suspending my belief in order to be taken to a world where things work differently that appeals to me so much more than going through hundreds of pages of a somewhat accurate retelling of a Tsar and his wife. Many aspects of nonfiction are great, but sometimes the truth isn't all that spectacular, at least in the case of literature and entertainment. Still, reading about Russia this year was certainly an experience.
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