Reading from around the world has been a popular reading goal on social media. From colouring in maps to drawing flags in journals: people seem to have an interest in discovering the world from their own living room. I can't blame them: it's much more comfortable to travel in your pyjamas without moving an inch. To help you find some classics to boost this challenge: here are 4 classics from Eastern Europe.
1.The Unwomanly Face of War
By Svetlana Alexievich
🇧🇾 Belarus
In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich set out to write her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from official narratives. (read more...)
2. The Essential Kafka
by Franz Kafka
🇨🇿 Czech Republic
Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy (read more...)
3. Poems
by Anna Akhmatova
🇷🇺 Russia
From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. (read more...)
4. Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
🇫🇷 Russia
Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. (read more...)
