Steven Hale
2 min readJan 6, 2022

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In my dotage, I'll probably never read Ulysses or Babbitt (or War and Peace or Gravity's Rainbow). I have read Siddhartha (a bit overrated) and The Red House Mystery (good but not great imo), and I may have read The Secret Adversary, but I can't keep up with the Tommy and Tuppence stories. Using the Wikipedia as a guide, here are some works from 1922 that I have read and recommend:

* Andrei Bely, Petersburg ("the Berlin edition"--which is shorter than the 1913 original and supposedly better; I'm not sure which version I read, in translation of course--probably the Berlin version and the first one in this list from the Wikipedia entry:

There have been four major translations of the novel into English:

St. Petersburg or Saint Petersburg, translated by John Cournos (1959, based on the Berlin version)[5]

Petersburg, translated and annotated by John E. Malmstad and Robert A. Maguire for Indiana University Press (1978, based on the Berlin version) (paperback: ISBN 0-253-20219-1)

Petersburg, translated by David McDuff for Penguin (1995)

Petersburg, translated by John Elsworth for Pushkin Press (2009). Winner of the Rossica Translation Prize.

In a review of all the existing English translations, Professor Michael R. Katz writes " . . . if someone wants to read Bely's masterpiece and to understand most of it, then learn Russian and read it in the original; if he/she wants to understand some of it, then read Maguire and Malmstad's magisterial annotated, introduced, and reasonably well-translated scholarly edition; and if someone wants just to say that he/she has read Bely's Petersburg for the sake of adding one notch to his cultural gun . . . then go read Elsworth's version."

* T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

* A. E. Houseman, Last Poems

* Cesar Vallejo, Trilce

Of these recommendations, Petersburg is the only one you MUST read (it's a kind of Ulysses but more complex in its own way). But I love Vallejo and Houseman, and recommend both most highly.

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Steven Hale
Steven Hale

Written by Steven Hale

Music: Discovering the lost and forgotten. Politics: Exposing injustice. Screenwriting: Emotional storytelling.

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