Discovering Russian Literature discussion

Hi there,
As I'm not a native Russian speaker and use Russian in an intermediate/advanced level I'd like to start reading some classics or contemporary books in original notation however I'm not sure which ones would be good for the beginning (because of the amount of hard/rarely used words, constructions etc.). Maybe someone could give me some tips?

Marta, you should choose authors who lived after Pushkin. Because that's him who start the modern Russian as we know it now in literature.
And i don't think you should start with poetry of XX century (Silver Century of Russian Poetry) - there are lots of symbols and metaphores in the poems. It can cause misunderstanding and confuse you with definitions.

Привет, Марта! Читайте только современных авторов. Какой жанр литературы Вам нравится?

This may be a bit "easy" for you, but when I was studying French at intermediate-advanced level I really enjoyed reading French children's books (for 9-13 year olds, not toddlers), and found that it dramatically improved my fluency. Tackling a "serious" book may seem like a worthy pursuit, but having to check the dictionary and mull over incomprehensible cultural references every 5 minutes takes all the enjoyment out of it and you may not stick with it. Kids' books will help you build your vocabulary and consolidate complex language structures, but are also fun and easy to follow, so you'd probably read more. I'd recommend looking at classic children's books by Soviet-era authors - Nosov, Zoshchenko, Dragunsky, Troepolsky, Gajdar. If you have access to a Russian-language library, I'd go for a browse, see what feels right.

A Russian friend of mine gave me a whole pile of contemporary crime fiction - Darya Dontsova, Alexandra Marinina, Tatyana Polyakova which are easy reading. For someone who studied Russian through the great classics and soviet socialist realism - I wish these writers had been around for light entertainment¡ Great too for modern idioms and conversational speech.

I'd add Polina Dashkova to Marie's list above. When I want to stay in Russian but I don't want to work too much, I start reading one of her books. And I always get hooked straight away!

One simple thing that some people do is to find something English that is fairly straightforward in its style of language and then find a translation in the 'target language' (in this case Russian). In the Soviet Union (and this continues to some extent in modern Russia) certain western authors were popular and translated often into Russian, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Jack London, O'Henry, etc., etc. If you can get to a reasonably big city wherever in the world, there's a chance there's a Russian bookshop or department in a bookshop, where you can find such things. There's a good chance this will specialize in Russian writers, but if you have quite a lot of Russian expats in that city you can find stuff there by writers from anywhere that are translated into Russian. I know you can find things like this in Berlin, London, New York, etc. Maybe somewhere like Warsaw too.

An advantage here is that you can also look at the original text in English at the same time.

If you fancy more of a challenge (or later maybe) you can find translations of more difficult things and if you read both texts simultaneously it makes it easier to follow and figure out what the words/phrases mean. Figuring it out as best you can yourself and then checking/comparing with the original helps a lot to acquire and develop the language.

Of course, you're Polish, so maybe you can use the same principle with Polish writers. Most things are translated into Russian these days. All I know that's popular and easy to find from Polish in Russia is Stanislaw Lem, but plenty else is translated. I have a Witold_Gombrowicz book in Russian, for example. But you yourself would know better which things are written in reasonably straightforward language in Polish. If the translator is not terrible, the resulting translation in Russian should be a similar level of Russian.

You can find tons of stuff, both orginal Russian literature and translations into Russian of non-Russian literature, online. I'm not sure about the legality of this. Some of it is public domain, of course, but the laws in Russia seem different anyway, though I'm not sure, but sites like lib.ru and many others have kept going very openly for years. I've seen the guy who runs it ask authors for permission to put their stuff on his site on TV, so I guess that's how it works, by asking permission, which is legal. If you want to find anything, just search for it in Google, putting читать or скачать or онлайн after the title. Most of this is oldish stuff though, presumably because modern authors and publishers don't allow this so often.

One simple example of something in simple language in English that is popular in Russia is 'the Old Man and the Sea' (Старик и море). You can find a copy of it in Russian to download or read online easily, I just searched on Google and every link on the first page seems to lead to a good copy of it.

Though maybe you're more interested in Russian writers, but, of course you can do this the other way around too. I knew people in Moscow who would buy Tolstoy or something quite serious and heavy in Russian and then get an English translation too. Those things are easy to get translated into any language. Also Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the like are Public Domain these days, so you can get free copies in English from the internet, or even free kindles on Amazon (you don't need a kindle, just an app on a phone, or their pc software), or read them on Kobo and other readers, etc, and then easily find copies in Russian online on Russian sites (like lib.ru, as I mentioned). These sites also often have stuff in the original language too, not just the Russian translations, and even sometimes the translations into English or another language of Russian literature. Of course, you'd have no trouble finding Polish versions of those classic texts, and could then read both texts in parallel, figuring out the Russian and then checking with the Polish, so it isn't too slow and frustrating.

Anyway, the basic suggestion is that you can find something simple in another language and then search for a translation of it in Russian, which you can often find online. If it's old, well-known, and public domain, this is likely to be easier to find. Or, on the other hand, you can seek out something Russian that you can find a translation of too, that makes it easier to deal with when you read both texts together.

There is also this series of books, seemingly chosen for not being TOO difficult, but also where the word stress is marked, and there is glossary of difficult vocabulary and phrases; there are lots of them, but it's hard to find a page anywhere that shows them all, recognisable by the red covers, by Gerald Duckworth publishing: http://www.paperbackswap.com/book/bro... here's one I have:



There are also dual language books, like this one: , and plenty of others. I know in Germany they do analogous 'Zweisprachig' books too.

Though that wasn't your question, but plenty of good advice above from other people: Fairy tales, of course, more popular modern fiction, because popular is usually simpler, and then just looking at the more interesting literary fiction and seeing what looks reasonably straightforward (the language is generally less convoluted in modern literature (though not always) in most languages, because the style of language is less of the focus these days), but then you have to have a look at them in a bookshop. But this one book sprang to mind (not entered on Goodreads yet):

http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/... Its subtitle is 'a book for those who don't like to read' and its premise is to be simple, and easy, with short sections you can't get bored of, yet at the same time it's quality modern literature. It's very little stories, in which not much happens, very everyday stuff and straightforward narrative and language, and each story is only generally 2 or 3 pages, but it all comes together as one whole thing about one town, and very much about Russian life, and also it's all kind of quirky, humourous, slightly strange, so it's not just some junk. The writer has won some literary prizes in Russia, and you might find that his language is reasonably straightforward in other books too, though I can't really tell you, and probably not as much as in this book, because that's part of his intention in this book, not because he so much really wanted to make it easy, I think, but because it creates a kind of style and aesthetic quality that he wanted for this book and that suits its content. Here's his page: Alexey Slapovsky

If you want to find recognised modern Russian authors, looking at the prize-winners is a good way -
http://bookmix.ru/groups/topics.phtml...
http://www.booksite.ru/department/cen...
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D...
http://www.knigodum.com/pkd62.pl


Or this list of writers might help:

http://readrussia2012.com/writers

Though I can't really tell you which are easiest to read, but as contemporary writers, you're more likely to find something like that there. There are definitely a lot of modern Russian writers who write in a simple narrative style, with the events and characters building up the 'feel' of the book without the more 'old-fashioned' approach of convoluted prose or philosophical musings with more difficult language.

Maybe someone who reads Russian and has found more time to read some of them can commment further.

I'd also recommend the books of Рубен Гальего too (yes, he is Russian, with a Spanish mother he only found later in adulthood; there's a documentary about it, but the story is told in his first book). Here's the wikipedia page about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A... . The books are autobiographical, and therefore written in a fairly straighforward style that tells his story via everyday experiences.