Andrei Maylunas' Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

Devils

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.5

Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-2. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to the devils that drove the Gadaren

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas, Ari Iaccarino, Ben Shapiro, and 1 others.

Andrei Maylunas

You can’t retell the book, but it’s about Russia and what’s coming out of it. It’s the chaos of politics and morals and religion at the end of the imperial period, reflected in this mystical Russian national character. It sounds silly to speak of, but there is a certain mystical quality to the Russian soul. [source]

Ari Iaccarino

I’m currently reading The Devils by Dostoevsky, and I expect to glean absolutely nothing from it but the pleasure of disconnecting from any other literature that requires me to learn a skill for the company. The overburdening characters and plethora of words for something that could otherwise be said in an instant is a type of therapeutic brain massage in an environment where saying as little as possible with maximum effect is the plow that tills the soil in startup atmosphere. [source]

Ben Shapiro

There's some light reading for you. [source]

2

War And Peace

Leo Tolstoi, Louise Maude, Aylmer Maude

4.3

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daugh

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas, Cécile Fabre, Kate McLoughlin, and 6 others.

Andrei Maylunas

One doesn’t have to invent the bicycle, there is one: it’s War and Peace. It’s about how Russia won the Napoleonic wars, and moved into the first row of nations who dealt with European history. It’s set during the peak of Russian culture, the age of Pushkin, who created the modern Russian language. It’s the peak…The only thing I would recommend to modern readers is to skip all those parts – which are completely separate from the other parts of the book – where Tolstoy is philosophising about the role of the individual in history. It’s maybe 15 per cent of the book, in separate chapters, and I would definitely recommend to skip those because they are not interesting today. [source]

Cécile Fabre

One of the key questions that Tolstoy asks in the appendix is the central question of War and Peace: how can we explain the fact that, on orders, millions of people go out and kill one another, when they know that killing another human being is morally wrong? [source]

Kate McLoughlin

Tolstoy didn’t fight in the Napoleonic wars, but he did fight in the Crimean war, so he drew on his experiences in that when he wrote War and Peace. [source]

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3

Notes Upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of That Country, Entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, by the Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, vol. I

Sigismund von Herberstein

4.5

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Afric

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas.

Andrei Maylunas

If you speak of Russia altogether I think one has to start somewhere, and you can’t start at the age of Enlightenment. So, the author is called Sigismund von Herberstein, and he was an Austrian ambassador to Venice. Quite enlightened for his times – it’s the Renaissance – he’s a free spirit, and he ends up being Hapsburg ambassador to Moscow, which is a rarity already. He travels through Poland or whatever was the geography of the time, and he comes to Moscow. At the time it’s not even called Russia – it’s called Muscovy – and Herberstein spends years and years there and writes this book. Also he has agents travelling all over Russia and all the way up to Siberia, and he tells you all the history and geographics of the country. I think the book is brilliant. First of all it gives you complete, colourful, Western insight on living in Moscow. And he gives you, very probably, the best picture of 16th-century Russia. [source]

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4

The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin

Sebag Montefiore

4.2

Prince Grigory Potemkin was Catherine the Great's lover, secret husband, and partner in ruling the Russian Empire. Their affair was so tumultuous, they negotiated an arrangement that allowed them to share power while he was free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine, her favorites. But they never stopped loving each other. Their endearing and passionate relationship remains one of history's

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas.

Andrei Maylunas

We move to the age of Enlightenment: a very nice, well-written book by Simon Sebag Montefiore, and it’s called The Life of Potemkin. So what do we have? We’ve had the reforms of Peter the Great, cutting his ‘window on to Europe’, then we had – and the 18th century is a crucial one – Russia meeting the Enlightenment. Catherine the Great comes to power, and that’s where the biggest revolution I think takes place, from the point of view of civilising the country. She has a great court, of which Voltaire was a part, as well as Potemkin, and this is a wonderful book about these times and days: highly entertaining, informative, pleasant and it’s a very important period, it’s when Russia became a great power. The book is a biography of Prince Potemkin, one of the great characters of the Enlightenment altogether, internationally recognised. You meet all the most interesting people of that era: from the Austrian Emperor Josef, to the Prince de Ligne – they’re all characters in this book and this is already not Muscovite Russia, it’s something transformed. [source]

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5

Oblomov

Ivan Goncharov, Marian Schwartz

3.8

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia’s serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov follows the travails of an unlikely hero, a young aristocrat incapable of making a decision. Indolent, inattentive, incurious, given to daydreaming and procrastination, Oblomov clearly predates the ideal of the industrious

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas.

Andrei Maylunas

We’ll do Oblomov. Again it’s classic, so I’m not going to comment on the story. But to understand it, let’s say it’s, from my point of view, one of the best books where you get the feeling of what’s called the ‘Russian soul’. There is the lazy landowner Oblomov versus his friend, who’s extremely decent, a nice Russian-German chap, Stolz. And it’s the whole story of Oblomov’s impotence, of the Slavic Russian character. If you want to spend a life marooned on an island somewhere, I would rather choose Oblomov than many other people: he’s wonderful, but he’s not a bore. I would say this book is the key to a big compartment in the Russian heart or character. Oblomov’s laziness and his impotence when it comes to doing something, combined with the best intentions and the most wonderful soul, and heart, and mind: that’s typically Russian. It’s a complicated combination but it does explain the Russian national character in many ways. [source]