As I work my way through War and Peace, I am struck by the degree to which Russian novels were ignored during my formal education. I think I read one Russian Novel -- Turgenev's Father and Sons -- for a class during my entire time in high school, college, and graduate school. That novel I read for a history class, not a literature class. The omission of Russian literature from the curriculum seems even more surprising considering that at the time, the Soviet Union still posed the greatest single international political and military challenge to the United States.