The Books of My Life: Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century

As Ronald Hingley notes in his Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, second edition, 1977) one can read the classics of Russian literature between 1825 and 1904 without knowing much about Russia economically, politically, culturally, and demographically. It helps, Hingley rightly argues, to know something about Russian economics, politics, culture, and demographic to truly understand and appreciate the classics of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Hingley's Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century does just that. It gives interested readers an understanding of Russian geography, communications, ethnic groups, the economy, its estates--its monarchy, its aristocracy, including landowners and the gentry, its peasants, its middling crafts people and merchants--its religion, its towns and cities, its legal system, its officials, its military, and its censorship apparatus, all in brief and straightforward compass and often with examples drawn from the classics of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Hingley's introduction to Russian society and Russian literature in the nineteenth century is an excellent guide, for the educated reader, to the interrelationships between Russian literature and Russian society and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know something about the broader contexts of Russian literature between 1825 and 1904. Not everyone will agree with Hingley's canon of the greatest of Russian literature during the era--Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Gogol's Dead Souls part one, Turgenev's Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, Fathers and Children, Smoke, and Virgin Soil, Goncharov's Oblomov, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons/Devils/The Possessed, and Karamazov Brothers, and Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Some might want to add further "classics" to Hingley's list.