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How should I even start making an account of it? For sure, I know quite a lot about Russian literature, many literatures of Russia. Not only just Myshkin, Dostoevsky's Idiot. I'm not sure if I have the book in its original version; I'm sure to have Anna Karenina, and others. I remember to have searched for it, and not sure if I found it.
Is it a privilege to read in Russian? This odd idea came to me for the first time when I read Steiner's Errata. Containing the comparativist's lament on "doors that remained unopened". I had it as school, together with some passages of Turgenev, and some verses of Pushkin. If I gathered my wits, I might be able to quote a verse from memory. But my perspective on such poets is irremediably postcolonial. I see through them all those underlying layers of landscapes, peoples, languages, identities. It used to be the other way around. Europe and the western world used to see Russia, the imperial, metropolitan Russia, and nothing but her. I see the peoples of Russia, and nothing but them. The Yakuts, the Buryats, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Circassians. Dostoevsky, Chekhov hardly form a background, a context for all of them. Certainly, there is a Bulgakov, and other writers. I was forced to read a great choice of them at high school, and even now I have them in my Multilingual Library. There must be dissidents even today. But my interest resides very far from Moscow, in the wilderness. |