Like many people, my husband and I typically welcome the New Year with close friends. There is always good food, music, and often a hike in the woods. But in 2022, for the first time there was a group reading. It so happened that I had just given a dear friend a little book by Leo Tolstoy titled “What Men Live By,” and five of us read it aloud, taking turns, from start to finish.

None of us imagined that less than two months later Russian President Vladimir Putin would order his forces to invade Ukraine, unleashing massive destruction, suffering and death. Since then, some here and around the Western world have been tempted to shun anything Russian.

Some shunnings were show-offs, like Hartford’s Russian Lady restaurant briefly calling itself The Ukrainian Lady, and some were understandably spiteful, like Ukraine renaming streets that honored Russian cultural and military heroes. Others have been downright foolish, like questioning the propriety of showcasing Russian music, theater or literature.

As 2024 begins and this horrific war slogs on, to my mind there’s never been a more opportune time to read Russian, certainly for insight and – depending on the author – either uneasy apprehension or high spiritual hope.

Consider “What Men Live By.” I won’t spoil the ending of Tolstoy’s beloved tale about a fallen angel and reveal all the lessons the angel learns after he has been roughly deposited, naked, on earth. But I will say, albeit far less eloquently than Tolstoy, that he learns not to play God.

Putin has obviously not learned this lesson - yet. And while I am not privy to his reading habits, it’s been reported that he keeps books by the satanic Joseph Stalin, who starved millions of Ukrainians with his collectivization scheme in the 1930s, prominently displayed in his office library.

A Russian friend tells me that Tolstoy remains the most revered author in Russia, and I was pleased to hear that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has as of this writing been reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” while imprisoned by the Putin regime for trying to cover Putin’s punishing war.

It could be Evan’s ploy for camaraderie with his jailers, or just a readily available big book to pass the time. But it’s an excellent choice period.

Sadly I haven’t yet managed to read “War and Peace” myself. But in solidarity with a fellow journalist, I researched Tolstoy’s views on war in general and was dismayed to read that he said it was pointless to try to make war more humane. Could Putin twist that into a defense of his army’s indiscriminate brutality toward Ukrainian civilians?

Of course Putin could, and perhaps already has. But it would be dishonest, just like his excuses for invading Ukraine, because Tolstoy’s salient point was that war itself is inhumane, therefore rather than try to play by any rules we must resolutely avoid the game altogether.

In my own library I have novels by Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky and Pasternak, poetry by Yevtushenko and Brodsky, plays by Chekhov and Gorky, plus works by various dramatists and historians I met in the Soviet Union as a journalist covering theater for The Day in 1983 and 1989, aided by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.

Since 2022 I haven’ tackled any of Russia’s big books. But I have modestly continued the Tolstoy tradition by reading an adaptation for children of “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” (2023) – about a greedy farmer whose quest for more land brings him nothing but trouble – and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (2024), a short, painfully honest novel about dying, denial and lament.

If Tolstoy does lead the pack of revered writers in Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, revered here albeit little read, is on the Russian blacklist according to my Russian friend. Not surprising, since Solzhenitsyn’s searing chronicles of Soviet gulags hastened the fall of the Soviet Union, which Putin has called the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century.

Solzhenitsyn was the son of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, and I was interested to learn that he and Putin met. Solzhenitsyn reportedly told Putin that Ukraine and Russia were so close in culture and history that they should forever be linked, a salve to Putin’s imperialistic soul.

But here’s the thing: While Solzhenitsyn advocated doing everything to keep Ukraine close to Russia, he stipulated that “everything” must exclude war. And when more than 90 percent of Ukrainians voted to become independent of Russia in 1991, including even a slim majority of those living in Crimea, it’s said that Solzhenitsyn gracefully accepted their decision.

Perhaps Putin had both Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy in mind when he called his massive war against Ukraine a simple “military operation.” It’s a sleight of speech, in any event, that wouldn’t have fooled those literary giants.

Bethe Dufresne is a former arts editor and columnist for The Day.