Brothers Karamotzov by Dostoevsky. Helped me see the relationship between suffering and happiness, between pain and pleasure. Made me realize that government is an exercise in making the best of a bad thing, given that so few people can handle power. Taught me ways that government can goad or torture people into submission. Confirmed my opinion that pseudointellectuals can fool quite a sizable audience. If this author spent so many years in the salt mines, I wonder how much of Russia's brain trust was decimated.
I’ve been a scifi and fantasy nerd for my whole life but Dostoevsky’s and Mika Waltari’s books have been more influential in understanding humans, their motivations and emotions than most of the fiction. Wish I could find more of something similar.
I would recommend short stories by Anton Chekhov, any "Selected Stories" collection is fine. His characters are just normal people from >100 years ago but they feel very real and relatable. He makes you feel as if you're inside their head, the topics are generally very tragic though and it can get a bit depressing.
I think late imperial Russians had a special talent for understanding the power of mumbo jumbo intellectualism.
I think this stems from enduring the continued existence of a courtly intelligentsia that sought to philosophically justify feudalism. This while the feudal institution had long collapsed elsewhere laying bare the preposterousness.
