The Petty Demon
10 best books like The Petty Demon (Fyodor Sologub): Envy, Sofia Petrovna, Petersburg, Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution, Memories of the Future, Maidenhair, A School for Fools, Forever Flowing, Seven Who Were Hanged, The Golovlyov Family
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 | 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 | Andrei Bely |
ISBN | 0253202191 |
Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, 'Petersburg' is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital—a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture, and politics are blended...
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 | Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky |
ISBN | 1590173198 |
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room;...
Author | Mikhail Shishkin |
ISBN | 1934824364 |
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle...
Author | Sasha Sokolov |
ISBN | 0941423077 |
“Since it’s winter what kind of butterflies can you be speaking of, asks the pedagogue with mock surprise, what’s wrong – are you crazy? And you respond with unshaken dignity: in the winter one can speak only of winter lepidoptera, those which are called snow butterflies, I catch them in the...
Author | Vasily Grossman |
ISBN | 0810115034 |
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....
Author | Leonid Andreyev |
ISBN | 1406933732 |
Sergey did not know that the colonel, having locked himself all the previous night in his little study, had deliberated upon this ritual with all his power. "We must not aggravate, but ease the last moments of our son," resolved the colonel firmly, and he carefully weighed every possible phase of the...
Author | M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin |
ISBN | 0940322579 |
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...
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 | Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin |
ISBN | 0451500458 |
Her mourth was almost pressed against his, and her words were like quick, hurried kisses: "You must absolutely go through with the duel tomorrow."
This is an account of the final days of Czarist Russia. An absorbing saga about the brutalities of military life upon its own soldiers. Stranded...
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 | 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 | Olga Grushin |
ISBN | 0143038400 |
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...
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...
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...
Author | Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev |
ISBN | 0801485592 |
"It evoked almost unprecedented discussions, like those at the time of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Some praised the novel far more than it deserved, others complained bitterly that it was a defamation of youth. I may, however, without exaggeration assert that no one in Russia took the trouble to fathom...
Author | Georgi Vladimov |
ISBN | 1935554670 |
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...