Professor Susanne Fusso is a professor of Russian language and literature and chair of the Russian department. She specializes in 19th and 20th century Russian literature and is the author of “Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky.” Professor Fusso does spend time away from the motherland, however, for Jane Austen or her current read, “Tales from Two Pockets”.

Liz Wojnar: What are you currently reading?

Susanne Fusso: I’m thinking of doing a new course on the Central and East European murder mystery, so I’ve been reading the Czech writer Karel Capek’s collection of stories, “Tales from Two Pockets”.

LW: Have you read it before?

SF: I read some of the stories when I was studying Czech in graduate school, but now I’m reading them in English translation.

LW: What is it about?

SF: It’s a collection of short stories that use the mystery or detective form to ask fascinating questions about how we know and how we judge. Like other East European writers like Skvorecky, Gombrowicz, and Kadare (and like all the truly great mystery writers), Capek uses the genre of the mystery to help us think about deeper issues. In one story, “Footprints,” the mystery is the appearance of footprints in deep snow on a city street, with no indication of where the person who made them came from or ended up. This mystery obsesses and torments the man who discovers it, but is of no interest to the police captain he consults, who acknowledges the inexplicable nature of the phenomenon but has no desire to investigate it further.

LW: Would you recommend “Tales from Two Pockets” to students?

SF: Absolutely. I would recommend them to anyone, since they are beautifully written and addictively readable. In general Capek is a neglected writer.

LW: Is it related to your research or scholarly work?

SF: The great thing about being a scholar of literature is that everything you read has something to do with your work. Well-written mysteries raise all the most important problems of narrative.

LW: Are European mysteries different in style from American mysteries? Are they more literary?
SF: The Central and Eastern European writers I mentioned are well-known novelists who have used the mystery genre for one or more novels—they are not as analogous to Agatha Christie as to someone like Paul Auster, who is a literary writer who uses mystery conventions for deeper purposes. But there are American and English mystery writers whose novels can sometimes be read in the same way, like Ruth Rendell or P. D. James in their best work.

LW: What do you usually read, for work or for pleasure?

SF: Since I teach nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature, I spend a lot of time reading and re-reading the great novels of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy. For pleasure I like almost any kind of fiction, but in particular I reread Jane Austen constantly. Any student who wants to improve his or her writing should read Jane Austen’s novels and study her sentence construction and the precision of her choice of words.

LW: What languages do you speak? Do you usually read books in translation or the original?

SF: Russian is the only language I speak fluently other than English. I can read Czech and French. For my scholarly and teaching work most of my reading is in Russian; when reading for pleasure I’d say I read 90 percent in English, the rest in Russian.

LW: Are there any less well-known Russian or other European writers that are overlooked by American audiences that you would recommend? What are some of your favorite authors that you would recommend?

SF: For Russian, Mikhail Bulgakov, especially “Master and Margarita”; Vladimir Trubetskoi, whose life spanned the late Tsarist period and the early Soviet period and who is almost completely unknown both here and in Russia, but whose wonderful stories, letters, and memoirs I translated for Northwestern University Press; and Daniil Kharms, whose writings, from the mid-20th century, are available in a collection called “Today I Wrote Nothing”.

I’m planning to translate a memoir “Trepanation of the Skull” and a novel, “Indecipherable,” by one of the best living Russian poets, Sergey Gandlevsky, so when those come out I’ll recommend them too. For Czech, everybody should read Bohumil Hrabal, especially “I Served the King of England and Closely Watched Trains.” I suppose my favorite non-Russian writer of all after Jane Austen is Charlotte Bronte, especially “Villette”.