Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, a native Muscovite born in 1799, is to Russian what Shakespeare is to English. Russians love Pushkin because he can express a world in seven words. My mother, who immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989, says that you can read Pushkin happy, sad, or drunk. Russian kids grow up reading and reciting his fairytales. All the great Russian writers that came after him or were his contemporaries—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anna Akhmatova—aren’t universal like he is. Each had their own particular flavor, and they were all inspired by him.

Reiner Stach’s biography portrays not just a man, but an age and place whose depths a great man saw and had the courage to transform into books that, in Kafka’s words, “affect us like a calamity

How many ways can you write the great American song—the song planted deep in the soil of national experience?

In 1933, George Bernard Shaw wrote the Manchester Guardian to protest the British press’s “blind and reckless” reporting on Russia. “Particularly offensive and ridiculous,” Shaw claimed, was “the revival of the old attempts to represent the condition of Russian workers as one of slavery and starvation, the Five-Year Plan as a failure, the new enterprises as bankrupt and the Communist regime as tottering to its fall.” Nothing could be further from the truth—or so Shaw thought. He had visited Russia two years earlier and “saw nowhere evidence of such economic slavery, privation, unemployment and cynical despair.” British readers, he scolded, should “take every opportunity of informing themselves of the real facts of the situation.”