Russian Poetry

[melonkali]

I have struggled with understanding Russian film and the Russian mindset for years. Nothing helped. Every time I saw a film by Tarkovsky, I ended up saying, "Wow, that was.... what was it?"

Then I came upon this advice: you can never understand Russians if you don't read Russian poetry. Russians are a very literary people, addicted to poetry, and most Russians can recite long pieces of poetry by heart.

So I started with Anny Akhmatova -- WHOA!! Suddenly it felt like I'd been lifted from my comfy chair and hurled, in the middle of a cold, dark night, into the middle of some wild freezing ocean, no land in sight, no idea where I was -- confused and cold and terrified, with nothing to do except start swimming, struggling against the waves and the cold, in any direction -- yet as I was swimming, I looked up and, for the first time, truly beheld the beauty of the stars. And I was weeping.

Heck, I even wept when I read her biography.

Does anyone else read Russian poetry, or understand Russian art or literature?

[HelenKa]

1. Anna Karenina

I'm about 200 pages into Anna Karenina right now. I'm really enjoying it so far. I feel like I'm a part of the world and each character is a friend of mine. I also don't really mind the long detailed paragraphs, while over all they mostly just describe trivial things, I feel that those things are the details of the painted picture. The little things in the background that while you don't need it to understand and like the picture or painting as a whole it just gives it that finer detail that adds to it. I donno. Just really digging it so far.