Jul 14
Have you read Russka by Edward Rutherfurd (1991)?
yes
no
I didn't finish it
I've never heard of it
Voting ended onJul 21
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Have you read Russka by Edward Rutherfurd (1991)?
yes
no
I didn't finish it
I've never heard of it
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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One of my favorite finds so far in Byron’s canon is his 1816 poem “The Dream”. It’s vivid and haunting, with beautiful use of repetition. It really feels like vicariously experiencing someone else’s dream.
Other things I’ve had a similar reaction to: the dream sequences in Borges’s short story “The secret miracle” (El milagro secreto, 1943), and the description of Ivanushka’s dream in the novella “The River” from Edward Rutherfurd’s episodic historical novel Russka (1991). Maybe a common thread is the way all of these make a point of calling attention to details shifting in strange and oddly specific ways that don’t immediately make waking sense, but seem significant somehow.
That Borges story also deals with a motif of time dilation in dreams, which is something Byron addresses in the first segment of his poem:
I would recall a vision which I dreamed Perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought, A slumbering thought, is capable of years, And curdles a long life into one hour.
Honorable mention to the Nightmare Song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. It doesn’t haunt me in the same way as those other examples, but I’ve always thought it’s a remarkably realistic depiction of dreams at their most ridiculous and nonsensical. (And one of the best patter songs in the G&S canon.)
The Americans are like the Russians. They are simple and straightforward, and speak from the heart – the Russians at their best, that is! But also they are unlike Russians, because they are free, and they know it.
Edward Rutherfurd, Russka
@vera-dauriac replied to your post: Evens for the opera asks?...
So much good stuff here and things I want to check out! But I also want to say thank you for the Shicoff mention! Love him! Also, Edward Rutherfurd fans unite!!! I can stiull remember the summer home from college when I stayed up too late reading Russka, listening to Rachmoninov.
Russka is great, I need to reread it someday. Got my copy secondhand at a library booksale a while back. I don’t think I’ve had someone to discuss Rutherfurd with before! :) The novellas I remember most vividly from it are “The River” and “The Duel”. There was a passage in “The River” that I did adapt into a proper aria, even tried to orchestrate, but didn’t get very far. (It was a beautiful description of the arrival of spring, and reflections on struggling to find one’s path in life.) “The Duel” has so many interesting echoes of Pushkin and Tolstoy and other things. You can tell there’s a lot of research behind the writing. Sarum was good, but I liked Russka better. I think he’s written some other ones, too?
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If you know too much they’ll hang you, and if you’re too modest, they’ll walk all over you.
Edward Rutherfurd, Russka
We want our history above all. Stalin rewrote so much we don’t have any idea what the truth is. Can you imagine what that feels like? To realize you have no idea what really happened, what made you the person you are? We feel like a lost generation. And we want it all back.
Edward Rutherfurd, Russka
And what drove him forward? Ambition: he owed all his success to ambition, but it was a cruel master. It drove you forward, but if you faltered, if you met an obstacle that stopped you, it leapt like a huge fiend on to your back, first screaming abuse, and then weighing down on you like a mountain, crushing the life out of you.
Edward Rutherfurd, Russka