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The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin

10 best books like The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (Vladimir Voinovich): Envy, Sofia Petrovna, Children of the Arbat, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Moscow to the End of the Line, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia: And Other Stories, Summer in Baden-Baden, Forever Flowing, The Golovlyov Family, Pushkin House

Envy
AuthorYury Olesha
ISBN1590170865
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...
Sofia Petrovna
AuthorLydia Chukovskaya
ISBN0810111500
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...
Children of the Arbat
AuthorAnatoli Rybakov
ISBN0099633302
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...
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...
Moscow to the End of the Line
AuthorVenedikt Erofeev
ISBN0810112000
Maybe the best book about Brezhnev's Russia imaginable. If you are the kind of person who has ever got drunk with friends, stormed a police station and then declared war on Norway then you will find much here that is familiar.

It's a book rich in allusion starting from the title (Moscow to Petushki)...
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia: And Other Stories
AuthorVictor Pelevin
ISBN0811213943
An anthology of eight short stories by the critically acclaimed young Russian novelist. The writing is colloquial and often whimsical, and many of the stories take supernatural phenomena very much for granted, as with the werewolves of the title story, or another in which the protagonist discovers...
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,...
Forever Flowing
AuthorVasily Grossman
ISBN0810115034
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world....
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...
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...
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...
Stories from a Siberian Village
AuthorVasily Shukshin
ISBN0875805728
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...
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...
The Compromise
AuthorSergei Dovlatov
ISBN0897333535
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...
Collected Stories
AuthorIvan Bunin
ISBN1566637589
"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....
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
AuthorIsaac Babel
ISBN0393328244
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,...
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