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Sofia Petrovna

10 best books like Sofia Petrovna (Lydia Chukovskaya): Poems of Akhmatova, White Walls: Collected Stories, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, The Women's Decameron, Kolyma Tales, The Time: Night, Summer in Baden-Baden, The Golovlyov Family, Pushkin House

Poems of Akhmatova
AuthorAnna Akhmatova
ISBN0395860032


Anna Akhmatova by Natan Altman (1914)

Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966) lived through the worst years of the 20th century in one of the worst locations in which to be a poet unwilling to play the role of a trained parrot for the ruthless and murderous apes running the country. Born in Odessa,...
White Walls: Collected Stories
AuthorTatyana Tolstaya
ISBN1590171977
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...
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
AuthorVictor Serge
ISBN1590170644
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...
The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn
AuthorSolomon Volkov
ISBN1400042720
Imagine condensing a 100 years of cultural history into 300 pages of incredibly dense prose with 100's of famous names being dropped into the conversation. It's a flurry of inspiration that's sure to pad your cultural TBR to keep you busy for a few decades.

I must give a cheers to Antonina W. Bouis...
The Women's Decameron
AuthorJulia Voznesenskaya
ISBN0704325551
Like Boccacio's famous Florentines, Julia Voznesenskaya's Russian women are cunning and savvy—about all facets of the Soviet system. They know how to beat it and how to endure. Quarantined in a Leningrad maternity ward after giving birth, ten women from all walks of Soviet life amuse themselves...
Kolyma Tales
AuthorVarlam Shalamov
ISBN0140186956
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...
The Time: Night
AuthorLudmilla Petrushevskaya
ISBN0810118009
First published in Russia in 1992, The Time: Night is a darkly humorous depiction of the Soviet utopia's underbelly by one of the most brilliant stylists in contemporary Russian literature. Anna Andrianova is a trite poet and disastrous parent. Heading a household dominated by women, she can cling...
Summer in Baden-Baden
AuthorLeonid Tsypkin
ISBN0811215482
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,...
The Golovlyov Family
AuthorM.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
ISBN0940322579
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...
Pushkin House
AuthorAndrei 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...
The Noise of Time: Selected Prose
AuthorOsip Mandelstam
ISBN0810119285
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...
Red Cavalry and Other Stories
AuthorIsaac Babel
ISBN0140449973
Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them. This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish...
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
AuthorVladimir Voinovich
ISBN0810112434
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...
Farewell to Matyora
AuthorValentin Rasputin
ISBN0810113295
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....
The Petty Demon
AuthorFyodor Sologub
ISBN0882338080
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...
The Queue
AuthorVladimir Sorokin
ISBN1590172744
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...
The Dream Life of Sukhanov
AuthorOlga Grushin
ISBN0143038400
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...
Generations of Winter
AuthorVasily Aksyonov
ISBN0679761829
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...
The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader
AuthorClarence Brown
ISBN0142437573
Clarence Brown's marvelous collection introduces readers to the most resonant voices of twentieth-century Russia. It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and...
Nervous People and Other Satires
AuthorMikhail Zoshchenko
ISBN0253201926
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...
Happy Moscow
AuthorAndrei 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...
Hope Against Hope
AuthorNadezhda Mandelstam
ISBN0375753168
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...
Faithful Ruslan
AuthorGeorgi Vladimov
ISBN1935554670
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...
The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars
AuthorNadezhda Durova
ISBN0253205492
..". sparkles with wit, intelligence and bold characterization." --Women's Review of Books

..". a ripping yarn... admirable translation... sensitive introductory essay." --Times Literary Supplement

..". a remarkable journal worthy of the attention of a wide audience." --Doris...
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