The Duel

Author	Ivan Bunin
ISBN	1566635160

“Blessed are those who will visit this world in its fatal moments!” Tyutchev – Cicero
The country is flooded with twilight… Anarchy and chaos are reigning over the nation…
No one believes the newspapers… Hearsay and rumours are all the news…
There is a rumor that the Allies...

Author

Ivan Turgenev

It never ceases to amaze me how Russian writers can take a tale of love gone wrong and the every day ennui of a relationship and turn it into a political ridden statement. Turgenev excels at this, perhaps even more than Tolstoy or Gogol.

In Smoke, a young man stops in Baden-Baden on his way back to...

Author	Valery Bryusov
ISBN	1903517338

"In a vividly atmospheric recreation of the occult underworld of sixteenth century Germany, during an age of Inquisition, three souls meet: an innocent young man choosing between Love and Duty, a woman prone to visions and a Knight, who is either angel or demon." Religious experience and sexual hysteria...

Author	Heinrich von Kleist
ISBN	1935554530

About This Book

"No amount of wisdom could possibly make sense of the mysterious verdict which God intended through this duel."

A new translation of a key work by one of European literature’s most important early writers.

One of the few novellas written by the...

Author	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ISBN	1409913589

I like to observe children. It is fascinating to watch the individuality in them struggling for self-assertion.



Need I say that parties or kindred social gathering aren’t invariably fun, nor for the attendants, nor for the host? Neither are weddings. As bringing a book seems quite...

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	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	Nikolai Leskov
ISBN	1612191037

A new translation of the hilarious picaresque about a man with an indomitable spirit
 
The Enchanted Wanderer is a Russian Candide with a revolutionary edge, a picaresque that features a fast-talking monk named Ivan who is at war, it seems, with every level of society. Working as a carriage...

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	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	Sergei Aksakov
ISBN	0192815733

At the center of this chronicle of Russian provincial life in the reign of Catherine the Great stands the patriarchal figure of the author's grandfather, Stepan Mikhailovich. A man of great natural dignity, imbued with respect for tradition and love of the land, he is also despotic and virtually illiterate....

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

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

This book is incomparable in the magic power of evoking startlingly vivid pictures of the Middle Ages. It is a gorgeous pageant, full of pomp and magnificence. Here and there the reader is given a glimpse into the mortal and humble frailties and exigencies behind the grandeur. This work is a fabulous...

Author	Alexander Pushkin
ISBN	1933633735

Ivan Petrovich Belkin left behind a great number of manuscripts.... Most of them, as Ivan Petrovich told me, were true stories heard from various people.

First published anonymously in 1830, Alexander Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin contains his first prose works. It is comprised of an introductory...

Author	Leonid Andreyev
ISBN	1425478158

The Red Laugh is an utterly harrowing and nightmarish depiction of a sort of apocalypse that springs from the chaos, blood, and misery of Russia's humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, in language that prophetically echoes the horrors to come during the First World War. Centered on two nameless...

Author	Giacomo Casanova
ISBN	1843910322

One of the few works written in Casanova’s native Italian, The Duel is an important example of the infamous Lothario’s vivid prose style. Translated for the first time into English, this autobiographical novel describes Casanova’s extraordinary battle with a Polish count, while on the run...

Author

Anton Chekhov

First published in 1891, this morality tale pits a scientist, a government worker, his mistress, a deacon, and a physician against one another in a verbal battle of wits and ethics that explodes into a violent contest: the duel. When Laevsky, a lazy youth who works for the government, tires of his dependent...

Author	Gaito Gazdanov
ISBN	0882339346

Ένα περίεργο βιβλίο, με πολλά αυτοβιογραφικά στοιχεία, που μας συστήνει τον Γκαζντανοφ στο ελληνικό κοινό και είναι σίγουρα υποσχόμενο. Αλλά κατάφερα...

Author	Joseph Conrad
ISBN	8402067425

El duelo es una de las más fascinantes novelas cortas de Joseph Conrad. Con las guerras napoleónicas como fondo romántico de esta historia, se narra en ella la contienda entablada por dos oficiales de distintos regimientos de húsares a lo largo de sus respectivas carreras militares, cuyos destinos...

Author	Robert Louis Stevenson
ISBN	0976140713

Originally censored by its British publisher, The Beach at Falesá is a scathing critique of colonialism and economic imperialism that bravely takes on many of the 19th Century’ s strongest taboos: miscegenation, imperialism, and economic exploitation. It does so with a story that features a...