The list of the books I’ve read since June 2023
June, 2023
Anatoliy Zhigulin, Black Stones (1988).
This book was written by my countryman, the famous Russian writer Anatoliy Zhigulin. He was living in Voronezh before The Great Patriotic War and was sentenced to imprisonment in GULAG in 1949.
The book has vivid pictures of Voronezh before and during The Great Patriotic War. I found it fascinating that most of the places described in this book are familiar to me. I literally see these places every day. It was a strange feeling, I figured out that some streets keep secrets of the past.
Anatoliy Zhigulin had been imprisoned for five years but was released and rehabilitated in 1955. His path in GULAG was terrifying and thorny.
I recommend this book for those interested in Soviet history.
Mikhail Bulgakov, Morfin (1926).
Alexander Kuprin, The Garnet Bracelet (1910).
July, 2023
Yury Trifonov, The House on the Embankment (1976).
The House on the Embankment, told by two narrators, is a series of intertwined reminiscences, flashbacks, and episodes, mainly of childhood and young adulthood in Moscow under Joseph Stalin. Most of the novella, told in the third person, relates incidents from the life of Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov. These portions alternate with short chapters told by an unidentified narrator who once knew Glebov.
Yury Trifonov, Время и место (1980).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Matryona’s Place (1959).
A novella written in 1959 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. First published by Aleksandr Tvardovsky in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1963, it is Solzhenitsyn’s most read short story.
Boris Akunin, Azazel (1998).
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (1945).
August, 2023
Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk (1956).
September, 2023
Boris Akunin, The Turkish Gambit (1998).
October, 2023
Boris Akunin, Murder on the Leviathan (1998).
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Suicide Club (1878).
George Samuel Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon (1926).
