Long railway journeys are the perfect occasion to read all (or at least the one or the other of) those classics that one always had the intention to read, but never found the right moment. And what would suit better a trip through the Russian hinterland seen through the window of a slowly rattling train than a Russian classic. What helps better understand the psyche of your fellow Russian travelers than a book written by one of their compatriots (and the occasional shot of vodka of course)?
on my pile of books are:
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
Nikolai Gogol - Dead souls, Diary of a madman
Wladimir Kaminer - Russendisko
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
other titles worth considering:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Maxim Gorky - The lower depths
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky - The Bedbug
Boris Pasternak - Doktor Zhivago
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov - And quiet flows the Don
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
more contemporary:
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated
Marina Lewycka - A short history of tractors in Ukrainian
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