I often go through phases with my reading. Recently I had a huge American phase (because I was in the States) and then a nineteenth century phase (when I got home) and then these phases joined up so that I had the combined power of a nineteenth century American phase! Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago, I got sucked into what I think is the literary equivalent of a supermassive black hole: Russia.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve always been very dismissive of Russian literature. I don’t know why. Probably just to be contrary. But also because every novel is half a mile wide and I resent having to swim through a book unless it’s Moby-Dick. I think reading Anna Karenina (which everyone seems to love) when I had nothing else to do on a three day train ride in India did irreparable damage. I can’t stand Tolstoy: too long winded, too didactic, way too many Russian aristocratic parlor-room conversations contrasted with the vibrancy and authenticity of Russian peasants and their native wisdom. But recently I’ve developed a bit of a man-crush for Sir Isaiah Berlin and, when I stumbled across his books Russian Thinkers and The Soviet Mind in the National Library, they lit some sort of a fuse in me. The way he writes about Imperial Russia with its Tsarist regime and censorship boards and secret police and gulags and radical dissidents–like Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin–all mixing wildly and bumping heads in the looming shadow of Bolshevik Revolution of 1917…I found it mesmerizing.