Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences.

On 19th-century Russia and the literary hotspot

Recently I started reading Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, which is a series of short stories about the people of rural Russia, when I realized that I'd put off for too long learning about the social and economic and political makeup of a time/place (19th century Russia) that's probably the most productive time and place in Western literary h…