Fifty Highlights from the Russian Literature is a standard work, containing detailed summaries and profound analyses of the most famous works of Russian literature (novels, short stories, plays, poems etc.).
In contrast to most literature compendia the book is not centered around the authors but around their works. The two volumes together cover a period of one and a half century – from Eugene Onegin till the The Gulag Archipelago. The first volume, focusing on the “Golden Age”, contains descriptions of works by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others, while the second volume, focusing on the Silver Age and the Soviet period, describes works of Chekhov, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and others.
The book is very useful as a reference tool for scholars and students but is at the same time written in a style which is comprehensible for everyone interested in Russian literature, inspiring them to read the original works.
Compared to its predecessors Classics of Russian Literature (1991) and Russian Masterpieces in Brief (1999), on which it is based, this edition has been thoroughly revised and new chapters have been added.
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Author
Maarten Tengbergen was born in The Hague in the Netherlands and studied Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Groningen. After his graduation he taught Russian at this university and translated three novels of Maxim Gorki and about twenty short stories from different Russian writers (Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Bunin, Sologub and others).
He has adapted and updated Fennell’s The Penguin Russian Course for the Dutch market and was the co-author of a book with everyday Russian phraseologies. His main work, however, is a compendium about the most famous works of Russian literature, written in the eighties (Classics of Russian literature, published in 1991, reprinted in 1999).
Having lived for ten years in Finland he has also translated modern Finnish writers and compiled two volumes of Finnish folk and fairy tales. Finally he has translated Polish poets, among them Tadeusz Róžewicz.
Currently he lives in Belgium. He is married and has three daughters. He is a member of the Flemish PEN Centre and the founding father of the “Club Russe des Institutions Européennes”, conceived to spread the knowledge of Russian culture within the European institutions.
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