Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2015-03-01 03:47 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-03-01 03:47 pm
[ SECRET POST #2979 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2979 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 091 secrets from Secret Submission Post #426.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Classic literature thread
Nikolai Gogol is one of my favorite authors for horror. Viy, The Nose, The Overcoat, and Diary Of A Madman are all very much worth the read. I think it's best to interrogate his works with the knowledge that his life was spent in deep religious fear. There is also a story that he may have been buried alive.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a book I have recommended before, and will again: it may or may not have inspired much of the American dystopian novels of their era, but it probably did. It's a great piece of work from a man who was a Bolshevik during the revolution, which is essential information to know before reading this one.
The poetry of Gumilyov is only worth mentioning because he was the husband of Anna Akhmatova, whose Requiem is one of the best collections of poetry about the terror of Stalinist Russia that still exists. Highly recommend reading both of their works together to fully understand them as writers.
Victor Pelevin deserves mention for Omon Ra, though he's not my favorite and maybe not strictly a "classic" author.
I have already mentioned Dostoevsky, and my love of the Strugatsky brothers about half a dozen times, but I'll mention them again.
And this is getting long, so I'll maybe post another comment below this.
Re: Classic literature thread
To be honest, I didn't really care for it. I felt like the author kept piling on new traits of his dystopia to show that it was dystopian. "Their moral code is based purely on mathematics! Let's have a paragraph about that and never mention it again! Their electrical devices are powered by the movement of the tides! That's . . . actually pretty cool; why is that even dystopian, and why did you never mention that again?"
Re: Classic literature thread
What he's referencing there was actually a very popular movement in Soviet Russia known as cosmism. It involved a lot of belief in science and transhumanism; essentially that mathematics and science were a force that would allow man to overcome nature.
The whole novel is a very accurate portrayal of the Bolshevist mindset and belief system. The voting scene in the novel, for example, is actually a highly accurate portrayal of what voting was really like under the Soviet government, and the ideas of the revolutionaries mirror the ideas of the Decemberists and the revolutionary movement Zamyatin himself was part of before his troubles with the government.
...tl;dr We is a novel that requires a lot of background knowledge about Russian history and the personal history of the author to fully appreciate. It's written from a very particular perspective of a man who loves his country and his revolution equally, and was wronged by the people who he fought alongside in order to topple the Tzarist regime.