Forever Flowing

Author	Yury Olesha
ISBN	1590170865

One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of...

Author	Lydia Chukovskaya
ISBN	0810111500

Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's...

Author	Tatyana Tolstaya
ISBN	1590171977

Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories — with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair — established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia's finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien...

Author	Anatoli Rybakov
ISBN	0099633302

To the two people among my goodreads friends, who are interested in Russian history and culture - this novel (first in a trilogy) covers the era of Stalin's reign of terror and is both riveting and historically accurate. It is mostly about a group of young people caught up in the workings of Stalin's totalitarian...

Author	Victor Serge
ISBN	1590170644

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead in the street, and the search for his killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at...

Author	Varlam Shalamov
ISBN	0140186956

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes...

Author	Leonid Tsypkin
ISBN	0811215482

Summer in Baden-Baden was acclaimed by The New York Review of Books as "a short poetic masterpiece" and by Donald Fanger in The Los Angeles Times as "gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving."


A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime,...

Author	M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
ISBN	0940322579

Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry.

One of the...

Author

Andrei Bitov

No other contemporary novel provides such clear insight into the Russian mind and way of life as Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House. First published in the United States in 1987 and highly praised for its inventiveness, Pushkin House is a contemporary literary masterpiece. Though the novel's focus is a...

Author	Osip Mandelstam
ISBN	0810119285

Collected prose works by one of Russia's towering literary figures. Osip Mandelstam has in recent years come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Mandelstam worked in many styles: autobiography, short story, travel writing, and polemic. Mandelstam's...

Author	Vladimir Voinovich
ISBN	0810112434

Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant...

Author	Fyodor Sologub
ISBN	0882338080

The Petty Demon is one of the funniest Russian novels. It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting, he is at once a victim, a monster, a silly...

Author	Vladimir Sorokin
ISBN	1590172744

Vladimir Sorokin's first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet "years of stagnation." Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn't matter...

Author	Mikhail Zoshchenko
ISBN	1585676314

In his prime, satirist Mikhail Zoschenko was more widely read in the Soviet Union than either Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. His stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920's and `30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous...

Author	Vasily Aksyonov
ISBN	0679761829

Magnífico de principio a fin... y mira que hay páginas entre uno y otro.

Los que disfrutaron de Vida y destino, de Grossman (comparten la misma traductora, Marta Rebón), disfrutarán aún más de este libro a poco que nuestros gustos se asemejen. Y digo disfrutar a pesar de las barbaridades...

Author

Andrei Platonov

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...

Author

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Biography Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different...

Author	Georgi Vladimov
ISBN	1935554670

Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian)

Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps...