The Twelve Chairs

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	Anatoli Rybakov
ISBN	0099633302

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...

Author	Venedikt Erofeev
ISBN	0810112000

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)...

Author	Alexander Pushkin
ISBN	0803720017

Bitterly, the weaver sighed,
And the cook in passion cried,
Full of jealousy and hate
Of their sister's happy fate.
- Alexander Pushkin
Human beings are complex creatures. We can love and hate with the same energy. When we meet a cruel person, we call him “inhuman”. Because...

Author	Nikolai Gogol
ISBN	0192828800

Hailed universally as Russia's finest comic writer, and by many as its greatest writer of prose, Nikolai creates a unique Ukranian world, from the darkest Gothic to folkloric levity. Here, this extraordinary countryside is revealed in all its variety in his first two collections of short stories....

Author	Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy
ISBN	1410225097

Here, for the first time, in its final form and in a new translation, is the epic Russian novel which has sold in its native country over two million copies. Alexey Tolstoy (who was not related to the author of War and Peace) began to study the character of his hero, Peter the First, in 1917. When he died almost...

Author	Victor Pelevin
ISBN	0141002328

Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age." In his third novel, Buddha's Little Finger,...

Author	Alexander Blok
ISBN	1857544730

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas trying to welcome the new order. Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'.

Author	Veniamin Kaverin
ISBN	1410103285

Two Captains is the most renowned novel of the Russian writer Veniamin Kaverin. The plot spans from 1912 to 1944. For more than half a century the book has been loved by children and adults alike. The novel has undergone more than 100 printings, including translations into other languages. Based on its...

Author

Alexander Volkov

Сказочная повесть Александра Волкова, написанная в 1939 и являющаяся переработкой сказки Фрэнка Баума «Удивительный Волшебник из Страны Оз» (The Wonderful...

Author	Mikhail Lermontov
ISBN	1853993166

Where the land knows no time
where bonfires have no end,
and doomed shadows often tend
to mutter songs that poorly rhyme,

there lies the Demon, another prey of his kingdom.

and one by one the ages passed,
as minute follows after minute,
each one monotonously...

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...

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	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

Andrei 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...

Author	Nikolay Nosov
ISBN	5955504605

Целую страну, населенную забавными коротышками, создал Н.Носов. Обитатели этой страны беззаботны, жизнерадостны, наивны, изобретательны, любопытны...

Author	Sergei Dovlatov
ISBN	0897333535

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...

Author	Mikhail Bulgakov
ISBN	5352004767

В настоящее издание вошли рассказы и пьесы М. А. Булгакова, характеризующие его отношение к воцарившейся советской власти, советскому быту и советским...

Author	Arkady Strugatsky
ISBN	5968000236

"Понедельник начинается в субботу. Сказка для научных работников младшего возраста" - под таким заголовком в 1965 году вышла книга, которой зачитывались...