Homework for Fans of Amor Towles

4 days ago

Take your experience of “An Evening with Amor Towles” to the next level with these literary recommendations from our moderator Martha M. F. Kelly.

To prepare for An Evening with Amor Towles, moderator Martha M. F. Kelly has compiled a companion reading list to deepen your experience. The works below have helped influence and shape Towles’s novels. From the Russian masters who echo through A Gentleman in Moscow to the American voices that inform Rules of Civility and The Lincoln Highway, these texts offer a window into the conversations behind Towles’s storytelling.

Amor Towles directly references these works in significant ways:

The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially Lincoln Highway)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond (especially Rules of Civility)
Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (especially A Gentleman in Moscow, but also Rules of Civility)
Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace (a key reference text for A Gentleman in Moscow)
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (both A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility)

For a deeper dive into A Gentleman in Moscow and its literary background, I recommend:

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
Nikolai Gogol stories, especially “The Nose” and “The Overcoat”
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Ivan Turgenev, A Sportsman’s Sketches (sometimes translated as A Hunter’s Notebook)
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (not directly mentioned, but it’s a very important text in the tradition he’s responding to)
Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Finally, it seems to me that a key text for Rules of Civility and The Lincoln Highway is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I don’t recall any direct references, but it’s hard to read Towles’ depictions of New York society and not hear it as being in conversation with Fitzgerald.

OUR MODERATOR

Martha M. F. Kelly is the Vice President for Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center (NHC). In particular, she directs the NHC’s famed residential fellowship program, having spent a blissful and productive academic year there as a fellow in 2022-23.

Previously, Martha was Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Missouri, where she was the Founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Migration Studies Institute, as well as the co-organizer of MU’s chapter for the American Association of University Professors.

Martha holds a BA with honors from Cambridge University, where she studied Russian and French, and a PhD in Slavic Language and Literatures from Stanford University. She is the author of Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic (Northwestern UP, 2016); her book-length translation of Olga Sedakova’s Old Songs (Slant Books, 2023) was a finalist for the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation.

A scholar of literature, culture and religion, Martha is deeply invested in public conversations about books, ideas, and other things that matter.

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