Read Classics to be a Better Investor

Russia's Greatest Novelists and their masterpieces may be used to guide investors:

"War and Peace, Tolstoy
Just like in Leo Tolstoy’s work, in which the war caused great economic and social destruction but eventually Russia prevailed, the investment backdrop for next year is seen as a “very volatile first half” followed by “a more peaceful second half.”

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
the novel’s heroine, is tempted by the promise of an eternal good life just as much as Russia was tempted by “seemingly never-ending oil revenue growth” before 2009.

Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
the preference is to avoid taking any action that may be politically or socially unpalatable,” said Weafer, adding that “eventually they must be confronted,” but this will not necessarily happen next year.

The Queen of Spades, Pushkin,
“The warning is that without reforms, growth may not last,” he added.

Dead Souls, Gogol
the “dead souls” metaphor is “close enough” to the Russian state’s ownership of strategic industries, particularly in oil and gas.

The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov
“Change is inevitable – it is how you handle it that matters,”

A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov
“It will be tough to satisfy the state’s wish to control strategic industries and also to bring in investors,”

Home of the Gentry, Turgenev
there a chance of a return to “a less optimistic and less happy existence full of regret and longing for what might have been?”"

MORE: http://www.emergingmarkets.org/Article/3120819/War-and-Peace-Russian-literature-and-investing.html

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Suffering and Literature

"Whatever the circumstances, Russians have never lost their deep love for literature. In fact, the worst of times, the best of books as its great 19th century literature stands testimony to: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov and a galaxy of several others. And the same tradition continued after the Revolution under the excesses of collectivisation and the Great purges of the 30s with writers like Gorky, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Marina Tsvetava and Boris Pasternak, whose persecutions were both “brutal and exquisite”.

In Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey into Russian History, which is history-cum-travelogue, Rachel Polonsky, a Cambridge academician, asks whether “there is a set of secret maps to be found among a person’s books, a way through the fortifications of the self” that would explain why a person’s deep love and apparent appreciation of literature (and culture in the larger sense) can be responsible for the execution of so many writers during the purges. Is this because, as the Russian scholar Dmitri Likhachev said, “the Russian people perish from an excess of space” that makes its literature “the most significant, the most tragic, the most philosophical”? These are the underlying questions, often asked about the relationship between suffering and literature, that Polonsky pursues in her book as she travels around the former Soviet empire to revisit the ghosts of great Russian writers of the past."

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/v-vjourney-into-russian-history/418671/



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Great Russian Literary Classics

Great Russian Literary classics are the focus of the upcoming Havana International Book Fair:

Currently, many people in Cuba have a perfect command of the Russian language. This will make it possible to establish communication beyond translations during the upcoming Book Fair, which, to pay tribute to the guest country, the Book Institute and publishing houses like Unión will put at the disposal of the public on their stands.

The amount of excellent poets in Russian letters that published their works between the 19th and 20th centuries is considerable. It’s necessary to mention, among them, Alexander Blok and Ana Ajmatova, authors that are unclassifiable within any specific literary current, and others like Serguei Esenin, Marina Stvetayeva or Vladimir Mayakovski. Also excelling between the 19th and 20th centuries is the figure of Anton Chejov, a universal playwright and prose writer of great stature and influence in the future of universal letters.

Other authors like Mijail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Máximo Gorki, Ilia Erenburg, Mijail Sholojov or Evgueni Evtushenko complete this summary panorama of great names.

But Havana’s Book Fair will also be attended by more recent authors, practically unknown to Cubams, whom they’ll be able to learn about by way of two anthologies of poetry and short stories prepared by the Arte y Literatura Publishing House. Also very much anticipated is the translation of El maestro y Margarita (The teacher and Margarita), by Bulgakov, by Cuban novelist Julio Travieso, which will be a new interpretation of that novel, a favorite and often read book in Cuba since its first publication in the 1980’s. SOURCE