Pleasure reading for a Russian summer

Two members of my team of medical providers were born and raised in Russia, and with one of them this week I got into a discussion about literature, obviously a more interesting subject to both of us than my reasons for coming to her office.

In Russia, she said, summer break for all students begins on June 1 and ends on Sept. 1. The dates don't vary from one school district to the next as they do in the United States. These three months aren't exactly free time, however, as students are given lists of 50 books to read over the summer. Most of the books were by Russian or European authors, she said, but there were a few American works among them. The book she most raved about surprised me: The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. She commented that compared with War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, both required reading during the school year, Cooper's novel was pleasure reading, perhaps what Americans call a beach book.

The Last of the Mohicans has not been viewed as pleasure reading in the U.S. for a good long time, although once it was. Published in 1826, it was a runaway bestseller, not just in the U.S. but in Europe, as well. Perhaps few people read it today, at least outside Russia, but for much of the 19th century, it was considered all but mandatory reading, bigger than anything by Dan Brown or James Patterson today. It put American literature on the map, for up until that time the United States had few writers of note, nobody whose work was read on the other side of the Atlantic. Cooper changed that.

That's why Thomas C. Foster includes The Last of the Mohicans in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America. Cooper was America's first professional writer, his books were that popular. "Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature" Foster writes. "Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty travelers have been following it ever since."

That being said, Foster points out that Mohicans is actually a very poorly written book. Mark Twain said as much in his famous 1895 essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," and Foster agrees with him.  "If you love language, love narrative grace, love prose style, Cooper offends every part of your literary sensibility," he writes.

Still it's quite a story, as even a Russian school girl would attest.