Moscow to the End of the Line

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	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	Andrei Bely
ISBN	0253202191

Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, 'Petersburg' is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital—a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture, and politics are blended...

Author	Victor Pelevin
ISBN	0811213641

Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: "full of the ridiculous and the sublime," says The Observer [London]. Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program the fulfillment of his lifelong...

Author	Sasha Sokolov
ISBN	0941423077

“Since it’s winter what kind of butterflies can you be speaking of, asks the pedagogue with mock surprise, what’s wrong – are you crazy? And you respond with unshaken dignity: in the winter one can speak only of winter lepidoptera, those which are called snow butterflies, I catch them in 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	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	Valentin Rasputin
ISBN	0810113295

A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.

It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village....

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	Ivan Bunin
ISBN	0140185526

A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century...

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...

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	Sergei Dovlatov
ISBN	0897333535

A very different read than my usual book. This is a collection of newspaper articles written in Estonia during the late 1970s, each followed by a longer description, often satirical (intended? or otherwise) which provides the true background of the articles. Through this the reader sees a sample of...

Author	Victor Shklovsky
ISBN	1564783111

While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary...