Generations of Winter
10 best books like Generations of Winter (Vasily Aksyonov): August 1914, Envy, Sofia Petrovna, Children of the Arbat, Ice Road, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, Sakhalin Island, Forever Flowing, Pushkin House, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
| Author | Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn |
| ISBN | 0374519994 |
In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr...
| 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 | 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 | Gillian Slovo |
| ISBN | 1844080595 |
Leningrad. 1933. Loyalties, beliefs, love and family ties: all are about to be tested to the limit in a fight to see who will survive one of the most crushing moments the world will ever know. Boris Ivanov, the father who understands politics and pragmatism; his daughter Natasha, a carefree, delightful...
'Land of the Firebird' is a WONDERFUL and ENGAGING in-depth look of Russian history from 987-1917, spanning the ascension of Vlad and the Orthodox Church to right before the Revolution. With colorful prose Suzanne Massie details the variety of Russian existence--tsars and serfs and merchant-princes...
| Author | Anton Chekhov |
| ISBN | 1847490034 |
In 1890, the 30-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous 11-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip...
| Author | Vasily Grossman |
| ISBN | 0810115034 |
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world....
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 | 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 | 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 | Victor Serge |
| ISBN | 0904613518 |
1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting...
| Author | Olga Grushin |
| ISBN | 0143038400 |
Olga Grushin's astonishing literary debut has won her comparisons with everyone from Gogol to Nabokov. A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores - really, colonizes - the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground...
| Author | Vasily Shukshin |
| ISBN | 0875805728 |
A cultural phenomenon in his day—an award-winning film director and actor who also wrote novels, plays, and movie scripts—Vasily Shukshin (1929–1974) is renowned for his mastery of the short story. Credited with revitalizing the short story as a genre in Russian literature, he was posthumously...
| Author | Andrei Bely |
| ISBN | 0810117576 |
The Silver Dove, published four years before Bely's masterpiece Petersburg, is considered the first modern Russian novel. Breaking with Russian realism, and a pioneering Symbolist work, its vividly drawn characters, elemental landscapes, and rich style make it accessible to the Western reader,...
| Author | Mikhail Zoshchenko |
| ISBN | 0253201926 |
Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are...
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 | Leo Tolstoy |
| ISBN | 0140449620 |
The stories collected in this volume demonstrate Tolstoys artistic prowess displayed over five decades experimenting with prose styles and drawing on his own experiences with humor and compassion. The Two Hussars, inspired by his time in the army, contrasts a dashing father and his mean-spirited...
In a world a few decades from now, Russia has lost its influence and descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians - those who consider themselves to be the original Aryan settlers of Russia - and the Khazars,...
| Author | Nadezhda Mandelstam |
| ISBN | 0375753168 |
The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered continuous persecution under Stalin, but whose wife constantly supported both him and his writings until he died in 1938. Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first...
| Author | Ilya Ehrenburg |
| ISBN | 1931541787 |
Падение Парижа = Pedeniye Parija = Fall of Paris, Ilya Ehrenburg
This exceptional novel by the well-known Russian writer describes the decay and eventual collapse of French society between 1935 and the German occupation in 1940.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز...
| 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...
