/lit/ - Literature

>>20131059
OP please disregard all other (admittedly quite good) suggestions in this thread and read Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. In the early 19-teens, as is somewhat well known, Tsar Nicholas II commissioned chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky to travel around the Russian Empire with his newly developed color photo camera to make a visual record of what the peoples and cultures of the empire were like. The result (like picrel) is a stunningly-clear window into a bygone era. Well, Gogol’s book is a little like the literary equivalent of this except set a bit further back in history. In it, Gogol’s protagonist travels through Russia and the people he meets and interacts with, though fictional, capture an aspect of Russian culture and sociality as they then were that is lost on even today’s finest cameras. While listening to the author read a draft of the work out loud, Pushkin grew depressed and finally exclaimed "God! What a sad country this is!"