The Story of a Nobody
10 best books like The Story of a Nobody (Anton Chekhov): First Love and Other Stories, Nikolai Gogol, Farewell to Matyora, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, Soul, The Galosh: And Other Stories, The Silver Dove, The Fur Hat, The Village, Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories
| Author | Ivan Turgenev |
| ISBN | 0192836897 |
This collection brings together six of Turgenev's best-known `long' short stories, in which he turns his skills of psychological observation and black comedy to subjects as diverse as the tyranny of serfdom, love, and revenge on the Russian steppes. These stories all display the elegance and clarity...
| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
| ISBN | 0811201201 |
The work of Gogol—one of the very greatest of Russia's literary geniuses—has become fairly well known in America but has seldom been properly understood. There have been many bad, but a few good, translations of his work available in English, and critics have often tended to put labels on him, to...
| 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 | 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...
A New York Review Books Original
The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda...
| 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 | 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 | 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...
| Author | Mikhail Bulgakov |
| ISBN | 0875010571 |
The stories collected here represent a sampling of the prose that first established Bulgakov as a major figure in the literary renaissance of Moscow in the 1920s, long before he became known as an influential playwright and novelist. The centerpiece of this collection is the long story "Notes on the...
| 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 | Ilya Ehrenburg |
| ISBN | 1931541787 |
Падение Парижа = Pedeniye Parija = Fall of Paris, Ilya Ehrenburg
This exceptional novel by the well-known Russian writer describes the decay and eventual collapse of French society between 1935 and the German occupation in 1940.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز...
| Author | Nikolai Gogol |
| ISBN | 1843910136 |
Nikolai Gogol’s short story is a sublime work of tragi-comedy. In it, he brilliantly ridicules the Ukrainian passion for litigation and reveals life as something really rather absurd. Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich are the greatest of friends—until the day they begin a foolish quarrel...
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White Nights and Other Stories, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"White Nights" (Russian: Белые ночи, Belye nochi) is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, originally published in 1848, early in the writer's career. Like many of Dostoyevsky's stories, "White Nights" is told in first person by a...
| Author | Maxim Gorky |
| ISBN | 0898751179 |
In My Apprenticeship, Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) gives an exact account of his own adolescence. After the death of his mother, fourteen-year-old Alexei Peshkov ( Gorky ) sets out to earn his own living. First he is the errand boy in a shoe shop; then, in turn, a draughtsman's apprentice, a dishwasher on...
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| ISBN | 1428052305 |
Originally published in 1907, this little known novel by the author of The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was considered controversial for its frank treatment of labor and industrial conditions, drug addiction, mercy killing, divorce, and second marriages.John Amherst, an idealistic middle...
| Author | Donald Rayfield |
| ISBN | 0375757716 |
Stalin did not act alone. The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and...
| Author | Vasily Aksyonov |
| ISBN | 0394727657 |
Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s The Island of Crimea imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography—Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian civil war ends with the tsarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. Skip forward sixty years, and...
