The Golovlyov Family
10 best books like The Golovlyov Family (M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin): Sofia Petrovna, White Walls: Collected Stories, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Summer in Baden-Baden, Pushkin House, The Noise of Time: Selected Prose, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, The Petty Demon, The Queue
| 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 | Tatyana Tolstaya |
| ISBN | 1590171977 |
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...
| 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 | Leonid Tsypkin |
| ISBN | 0811215482 |
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,...
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 | 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 | Vasily Grossman |
| ISBN | 1590173619 |
The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning...
| 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 | 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 | Ivan Goncharov |
| ISBN | 0898751985 |
The Same Old Story (1847) tells the story of Alexander Aduyev who leaves the idyllic setting of his home in the country to seek his fortune and make a career in St. Petersburg under the guidance and protection of his uncle, a government official. Such is the beginning of this "ordinary story". Alexander...
| Author | Nikolai Leskov |
| ISBN | 1843910683 |
In this powerful and brutal short story, Leskov demonstrates the enduring truth of the Shakespearean archetype joltingly displaced to the heartland of Russia. Chastened and stifled by her marriage of convenience to a man twice her age, the young Katerina Lvovna goes yawning about the house, missing...
| Author | Ivan Turgenev |
| ISBN | 0940322455 |
Turgenev was the most liberal-spirited and unqualifiedly humane of all the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and in Virgin Soil, his biggest and most ambitious work, he sought to balance his deep affection for his country and his people, with his growing apprehensions about what their...
| 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 | Ivan Bunin |
| ISBN | 1847491049 |
Set during the 1905 Revolution in southwest Russia, this is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of the lives of two peasant brothers, “characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human.” With brutal honesty it reveals the pettiness, violence, and ignorance of rural...
