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...
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...
Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia (Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History)
Translations in Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia, gathered from archives and appearing in English for the first time, offer a fresh look at Dostoevsky's House of the Dead from the perspective of his fellow inmates and Siberians who were imprisoned, tortured, and exiled by the regime of Nicholas I. Drawing on archival resources and illustrations, introductory essays immerse the reader in the experience of the political prisoners who must navigate the criminal environment of verbal, physical, and...
Uncle Vanya (Plays for Performance) (Oberon Classics)
by Anton Chekhov
Along with Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya is credited as one of Chekhov's masterpieces and a significant precursor of modern drama. Set on a country estate in late nineteenth century Russia, Uncle Vanya is in part a study of the enervation of Russian middle-class provincial life. The major dynamics between the characters themselves are centred on two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere and a flirtation that brings disaster. Mixing the tragic and the absurd and dealing wit...
Over at Uncle Joe's (The Women War Correspondents, #5)
by Oriana Atkinson and Paul Galdone