The Galosh: And Other Stories

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	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

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	Yevgeny Zamyatin
ISBN	0226978680

Zamyatin is best known for the brilliant dystopian novel We, one of the great classics of science fiction. The Dragon is a collection of fifteen of his short stories (including a 67 page novella) published between 1918 and 1935. It also includes an introduction by the translator, Mirra Ginsburg, and...

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	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	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	Vladimir Voinovich
ISBN	0156340305

I read Vladimir Voinovich's short comic masterpiece back in 1989 when first published in English and read it three more times over the years, including this past week. One thing has remained consistent – I laughed out loud on nearly each page. This is a very funny book.

Hardly a whopping...

Author	Ivan Bunin
ISBN	1566637589

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger....

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	Andrei Platonov
ISBN	0940322331

This collection of Platonov's short fiction brings together seven works drawn from the whole of his career. It includes the harrowing novella Dzahn ("Soul"), in which a young man returns to his Asian birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech, and "The...

Author	Isaac Babel
ISBN	0393328244

Finally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). Reviewing the work in The New Republic,...

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

Tatyana Tolstaya

By "the most original, tactile, luminous voice in Russian prose today" (Joseph Brodsky), Sleepwalker in a Fog is a collection of seven stories and a novella set in contemporary Russia. Here is Denisov, who fears his greatest accomplishment in life will be the treatise he wrote and tore up. He is betrothed...

Author	Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy
ISBN	0898751268

The central place in Alexei Tolstoy's work is held by his books about the events of the Great October Revolution and the Civil War. His Ordeal (1919-1941) is a book about the Russian people as they forge their way to a new life, about the Russian intelligentsia which, as a result of a long "ordeal", found...

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...