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@ashley-tegart

Hi Ashley!

Your quote got my attention:

What British and Russian authors do you like?
Of Russian authors, I have read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”, etc. and Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”, and some parts of Leo Tolstoy’s works, to name a few.  We sometimes watch old Soviet-era Russian comedies [with English subtitles] on YouTube, as well.

Of the Brits, I do love Charles Dickens (“Bleak House” is awesome), William Shakespeare (the bard of course), Jane Austen (“Pride and Prejudice” is a fav), Emily Bronte (“Jane Eyre”), and some of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

My major in college was British and American Literature, and my wife is an immigrant, (now a full US Citizen [for many years now]), from Russia. We traveled back to Russia four times since we were married in 2000. Fascinating place. Almost like a kind of time-travel going there.  We vehemently are against its politics, since we are both Christians, but it did present itself as a very moral society, even though it cloaked its darkness behind an Iron Curtain.

I find the works of Ayn Rand interesting, though I think she takes individualism too far (touting “selfishness” as a virtue). However, she was reacting against the other extreme of the evils of collectivism (Marxism) so I tend to cut her a lot of slack.
Here is a quote from her first novel, that I thought was interesting.  The MC is Kira, a very talented engineering student, whose, once prosperous, and hard-working family was devastated in the Soviet uprising, said to be “for the people”:

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. . . . And who — in this [cursed] universe — who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? . . . But you’ve tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts — and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls — and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left — look!”

— Kira Argounova, We the Living by Ayn Rand

“We the Living” is such an atmospheric novel, and Ayn writes amazingly evocative prose in that one.  She was an atheist, though, and sadly some of her works (though not all) do include some amoral behavior that I would not recommend to younger readers.