Russian silhouettes (Primary Sources, Historical Collections)
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Out of the initial act of counterfeiting a ruble note grows a series of evil deeds, in this, Tolstoy's last short novel. His theme is the consequences of every human action, for both good and ill: our responsibilities run deep. The escalation of evil can be stopped only by one who humbly absorbs it, without passing it on.
Mondegreen (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Lierature)
by Volodymyr Rafeyenko
Odessa was a uniquely Jewish city, and the stories of Isaac Babel - a Jewish man, writing in Russian, born in Odessa - uncover its tough underbelly. Gangsters, prostitutes, beggars, smugglers: no one escapes the pungent, sinewy force of Babel's pen. From the tales of the magnetic cruelty of Benya Krik - infamous mob boss, and one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature - to the devastating semi-autobiographical account of a young Jewish boy caught up in a pogrom, this collection of stori...
The news that a government inspector is due to arrive in a small Russian town sends its bureaucrats into a panicked frenzy. A simple case of mistaken identity exposes the hypocrisy and corruption at the heart of the town in this biting moral satire.David Harrower's version of Nikolai Gogol's Government Inspector premiered at the Warwick Arts Centre in May 2011 and transferred to Young Vic, London in June.
Moscow in the 1930s is the consummate symbol of the Soviet paradise, a fairy-tale capital where, in Stalin's words, 'life has become better, life has become merrier'. In "Happy Moscow" Platonov exposes the gulf between this premature triumphalism and the harsh reality of low living standards and even lower expectations. For in Stalin's ideal city there is no longer a place for those who do not fit the bright, shining image of the new men and women of the future. The heroine, Moscow Chestnova, is...
Sasha Sokolov is one of few writers to have been praised by Vladimir Nabokov, who called his first novel, A School for Fools, "an enchanting, tragic, and touching book." Sokolov's second novel, Between Dog and Wolf, written in 1980, has long intimidated translators because of its complex puns, rhymes, and neologisms. Language rather than plot motivates the story-the novel is often compared to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake-and time, characters, and death all prove unstable. The one constant is the...
This volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes. ‘Zima Junction’ vividly describes his idyllic childhood in Siberia and his impressions of home after a long absence in Moscow. Private moments are captured in ‘Waking’, on the joys of discovering the unexpected in a lover, and ‘Birthday’, on a mother’s concern for her son,...
By the author of Life and Fate, now a major Radio 4 drama starring Kenneth Branagh. Vasily Grossman is widely recognized as one of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century. The short fiction collected here - satire, comedy, tragedy and pure narrative - illustrate the remarkable breadth of his work, and demonstrate all the bold intelligence, delicate irony and extraordinary vividness for which he has become known. In addition to the eleven stories, this volume includes the comple...
Bored and childless, Katerina Ismailov lives with her husband, Zinovy, under the cruel rule of her father-in-law, Boris. When Boris and Zinovy are both called away from their estate on urgent business, Katerina’s attentions soon turn to Sergei, the newly-arrived farmhand – and thus begins Nikolai Leskov’s perfectly formed tale of lust, murder, guilt and revenge.
A new collection of short fiction and nonfiction by a Russian master of bittersweet humor, dramatic irony, and poignant insights into contemporary life. The town of Tarusa lies 101 kilometers outside Moscow, far enough to have served, under Soviet rule, as a place where former political prisoners and other “undesirables” could legally settle. Lying between the center of power and the provinces, between the modern urban capital and the countryside, Tarusa is the perfect place from which to obser...
City Folk and Country Folk (Russian Library)
by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya
An unsung gem of nineteenth-century Russian literature, City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of Russia's aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites in the 1860s. Translated into English for the first time, the novel weaves an engaging tale of manipulation, infatuation, and female assertiveness that takes place one year after the liberation of the empire's serfs. Upending Russian literary cliches of female passivity and rural gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshc...