What to Read to Understand Russia

Welcome to the Books Briefing, our weekly guide to The Atlantic’s books coverage. Join us Friday mornings for reading recommendations.

A century and a half after they were writing, authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature. But in an essay we published this week, Anastasia Edel, the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution, and the New Tsar, argues that the rarified society those 19th-century writers depicted offers little help in understanding the brutal war currently being waged in Ukraine. Instead, Edel suggests that readers who want to comprehend Putin’s Russia look to Chevengur, an epic account of the Russian Revolution, written in 1929 by the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and wasn’t widely available there until the late 1980s: Stalin thought it depicted the revolution as unduly savage.

Platonov’s work remained largely until she moved to the U.S. in the ’90s. The novel, available this month in a new English translation, is long, dense, and strange. But Edel argues that it offers unparalleled insight into the way that dangerous and misguided ideas can stoke violence and warp a nation. As Edel writes, “the ease with which Putin’s Russia accepts and perpetuates brutality ceases to confound once one has witnessed Platonov’s rendering of a country that seems to run on violence.” This week, I emailed Edel and asked her to recommend a few more titles. Our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, is below.