This Month’s Reading Will Involve a Satanic Feline

Challenge #2: Read a Serious Russian Novel.

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Page Count: 0/402

February’s challenge is one that I have been dreading somewhat.  In my post on At Swim, Two Boys, I mentioned that there were only two books assigned to me in high school that I refused to read.  I have already disclosed that one of them was Wuthering Heights.  This was an omission I later corrected in my free time, and it was a novel that I ended up enjoying very much.  The other book, Crime and Punishment, was abandoned about 150 pages in, and I have never, ever felt compelled to get back to it.

Since then, I attempted to read two of the crowning jewels of the Russian literature canon.  I got through half of Anna Karenina before giving it up in favour of something less weighty and verbose, and The Brothers Karamozov fared even worse.  Both are still sitting on my bookshelf at home, and I know that I ought to have picked one of them for this challenge.

But:

(1) They’re both really, really long.
(2) They’re both super, super serious.  (I’ve read in places that Dostoyevsky’s works are quite comic in parts, but Katherine, who will be tackling The Idiot, will have to confirm if this is actually true.)

Therefore, I am cheating a bit: instead of a Serious Russian Novel, I will instead be reading a Satirical Soviet Novel.  A dear friend gave me a copy of The Master and Margarita as a birthday present last year and inscribed a very hearty recommendation for it inside the cover, so I am approaching this book very positively.  To make a classical music analogy, my hope is that The Master and Margarita will be less Tchaikovsky and his ponderous chords, more Prokofiev and his devilish charm crossed with the mordant, ambiguous wit of Shostakovich.  (Okay, I’m done now.)