Greg (The Shrike) and I would like to inaugurate the Russian Book Club here at Read And Find Out. Our club will intersect at a couple of points with the ongoing and permanent book club, but we will have a new selection every month over the course of twelve months, with the selections designed to complement one another and vary in length to avoid overwhelming the reader.

We are posting the planned schedule here, along with a brief introduction to each of the books that we have chosen to help interest people who might be wavering about one selection or another. If you have any additional questions or comments, please feel free to ask us, either here or via a noteboard message.

Discussions will be conducted in English (in case anyone was wondering) and Greg will be reading English translations of the books to that end, while I will remain in my ivory tower of elitism and read them in the original.

When each book is announced, we will select a recommended translation, but this should not disadvantage those who read the book in other languages or other translations - it's simply to help reduce the chances that someone will not like a particular book due to the translation.

For the first book, Doctor Zhivago, it appears that the Hayward/Harari translation is a fairly good choice. Anyone looking for alternative translations of the poems of Yuri Zhivago attached to the end of the book is advised to avoid the translations published in the Toronto Slavic Review (which is high on the list if you Google the poems).

And so, our choices are:

March 15: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for this novel (though the Soviet authorities forced him to refuse it), a very lyric poem in prose form that is true to the great Russian novels of the Nineteenth Century in idea and scope, yet closer to the emotional and personal poetry of the early Twentieth Century in feel. The novel follows the life of a doctor and poet, who tries to reconcile his own beliefs and Christian sense of the value of the individual in the midst of a series of revolutions and chaos that threw Russia into some of the deepest inhumanity the world has known.

April 15: Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin is one of Russia's greatest poets, and certainly its most revered. Unfortunately, much of his poetry does not translate well into English, and so we have selected a stunning play with lines as memorable as those of Shakespeare and a story that grips the reader. It tells the history of Boris Godunov, the Tsar who ruled after Ivan the Terrible's family had died out (and indeed, after he had killed the youngest and last of Ivan's children) and who plunged Russia into its "Time of Troubles", which ended when the Romanovs took power. It addresses issues of ambition, power and murder, as well as the unhealthy relationship between the ruler and people in Russia.

May 15: Buddha's Little Finger by Viktor Pelevin. Pelevin is a modern author with an experimental style that draws on his experiences with Buddhism, psychedelic drugs, pop culture (particularly computer games and vampire lit) and his own fractured view of Russia's history. This book, considered his most "literary" effort, involves the surreal experiences of a man who is either in an insane asylum and thinking he's a revolutionary in the Russian Revolution, or a revolutionary seeing the terrible future his efforts is creating. Or maybe both, or neither, are true.

June 15: The Nose and The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. Gogol's stories display a grotesque humour that many frequently misinterpret as a grim and dark, even sombre tone. However, by reading the two short stories we have selected, the reader will see how his satire of St. Petersburg society and its hierarchy is spot-on, and if it seems serious at times, it's because he's viciously attacking someone's values with his wit. Like the previous Pelevin selection, there's a fantastic quality to Gogol. The reading will be short, but we expect the discussion to be extended.

July 15: Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's novel has been called one of the best works of the Twentieth Century and inspired a cult following (Mick Jagger even supposedly wrote "Sympathy for the Devil" after reading it). Bulgakov, writing in the best fantastic traditions of Gogol, wrote a story about the devil coming to Moscow in the Soviet period to make mischief upon the atheists who stopped believing in him. At the same time, it's the story of the Master, a writer who chose to write a book about Pontius Pilate, then tried to burn it, and his love affair with the beautiful Margarita. The two stories weave into one cohesive whole as the story progresses.

August 15: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky liked to call his style "fantastic realism", but his books are much closer in style to the unfinished book of Bulgakov's master than the works of his contemporary Gogol. Dostoevsky was an epileptic, which made him intensely introspective, and as a result all his works have a rich and vibrant inner dialogue to them and are thick with ideas and thoughts. This short work is a good introduction to the author, as well as a classic portrait of an antisocial misanthrope. Dostoevsky's conclusions about what the Underground Man means for society are striking.

September 15: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev is considered one of Russia's most readable authors, and he has a beautiful and light style that nonetheless leads to forceful revelations. One of those revelations happened to be "God is dead" - a sentiment first printed in the novel we have selected. Turgenev (a contemporary of Dostoevsky) paints the picture of a very different sort of misanthrope than Dostoevsky's Underground Man in the figure of nihilist student Bazarov. However, the implications of Bazarov's personality are no less significant for Russia and Western Thought generally than Dostoevsky's. He also masterfully portrays generational conflict and the death of idealism, set to the backdrop of a beautiful rural idyll.

October 15 (first half) and November 15: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It's so long it takes up two months of discussion. Don't let that dissuade you, however. War and Peace is written in simple, flowing sentences and Tolstoy populates his book with memorable and sympathetic characters (as well as those you love to hate). He sets his work in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, and L'Empereur himself makes appearances. During the course of his mammoth book, Tolstoy manages to philosophise about love, death, the causes of war, human vanity and virtually every "big idea" from the era of the novel.

December 15: We by Evgeni Zamyatin. Zamyatin's book was a seminal work in the genre of anti-utopian novels. In fact, it's one of the first dystopian novels ever written, and it inspired Huxley to write Brave New World and Huxley's student, Orwell, to write 1984. Zamyatin's book was itself inspired by the Russian Revolution and his horror at the controls placed on human behaviour and thought. However, his dystopia could be located anywhere, and the frightening implication is that it's everywhere. It is not merely a classic of science fiction; it is a classic of literature.

January 15, 2011: Sukhodol by Ivan Bunin. Bunin, like Pasternak, was a Nobel laureate, but he received his prize while living as an emigre, as he fled Russia after the Revolution. Perhaps because he lived in Paris until his death in 1953, his works carry a sense of ennui and loss. His writing, as a result, is like Impressionist paintings, as the nostalgia blurs the edges of the pictures he paints and creates something different from what really happened. This work, one of his most famous, chronicles the fall of a once-proud noble family into poverty and has been called the Gone With the Wind of Russian literature.

February 15, 2011: Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. We end our Russian Book Club with one of the most significant books written in the history of Russian literature. Dostoevsky's final novel represents the pinnacle of his thought and stands as one of the crowning achievements of Nineteenth Century literature. It is the story of the sons of one man, and how each of them chose radically different paths in life, and how each is unable to reconcile their lives to the ideals that they are asked to live up to by society. It is a story of murder, the miscarriage of justice, the failures of religion, the isolation of the free thinking modern man and the dangers of the mob. It is also a dark prophecy of what Russia would become in the Soviet Union.