Books by Elena Umanskaya

If you dream of reading Russian literature in the original, how do you get from the language of the textbook to the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Tom Besinger, who spent a year building a glossed reading room for the Russian classics, recommends five books for learning Russian, focusing on the difficult middle ground between finishing a textbook and being able to read confidently in the language. He also explains why the advice normally given—to start with something short—is wrong.