When you hear the words "Russian literature," what is the first thing you think? The first thing I think is "humungous novels." Enormous books like Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov are some of the most famous pieces of writing in the Russian tradition. On top of that, you could build some serious muscles carrying one of these novels around.
That said, Russia has also produced some incredible short-form writers, perhaps some of the best ever. Nikolai Gogol published funny yet disturbing short stories such as "The Nose" and "The Overcoat". And though Anton Chekhov is largely remembered as an ingenious playwright, he was also a writer of ingenious and moving short stories. Some of Chekhov's best works of fiction are only a few pages long.
And often, the greats of Russian literature were masters of length and brevity alike. Just look at Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak, who created an epic novel (Doctor Zhivago) but also wrote some remarkable lyric poems (My Sister Life). Another Russian Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is famous for both short novels (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and monumental compositions (The Gulag Archipelago)."
Which do you enjoy more: Russian literature's monumental novels, or Russian literature's dense short stories? And why do you think the novels hog all the attention?
Or do they really?