The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants
10 best books like The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (Alexandra Popoff): The House by the Dvina: A Russian Childhood, George Eliot, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, The Selected Letters, Byron: Life and Legend, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, Louisa May Alcott, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle
| Author | Eugenie Fraser |
| ISBN | 0552128333 |
The riveting story of two families separated in culture and geography but bound together by a Russian-Scottish marriage includes the purchase by the author's great-grandfather of a peasant girl with whom he had fallen in love, the desperate sledge journey in the depths of winter made by her grandmother...
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 1844084981 |
Best known for her masterpieces Middlemarch and Silas Marner, George Eliot (1819–1880) was both one of the most brilliant writers of her day, and one of the most talked about. Intellectual and independent, she had the strength to defy polite society with her highly unorthodox private life which...
| Author | Rosamund Bartlett |
| ISBN | 1846681383 |
A hundred years ago in November 1910 Count Leo Tolstoy died on a remote Russian railway station, attended by the world's media, taken ill as he was finally attempting to escape his decadent (as he saw it), aristocratic family life.
Tolstoy has been universally recognised as a colossus of world...
| Author | Willa Cather |
| ISBN | 0307959309 |
This first publication of the letters of one of America’s most consistently admired writers is both an exciting and a significant literary event. Willa Cather, wanting to be judged on her work alone, clearly forbade the publication of her letters in her will. But now, more than sixty-five years after...
| Author | Fiona MacCarthy |
| ISBN | 0571179975 |
An excellent biography of Byron - and I've read a few by now. To be honest, during Byron's early years I was feeling as if I'd read it all (or most of it) before. But during the later years, especially once he reaches Venice, the book really came into its own. I felt there was more depth, detail and interest...
| Author | Charles King |
| ISBN | 0393342360 |
"Rich and riveting, complex and compelling, powerful and poetic."—Peter M. Gianotti, Newsday
In Odessa, the greatest port on the Black Sea, a dream of cosmopolitan freedom inspired geniuses and innovators, from the writers Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir...
Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 1930s, she wrote some of her finest...
Louisa May Alcott never intended to write "Little Women." She had dismissed her publisher's pleas for such a novel. Written out of necessity to support her family, the book had an astounding success that changed her life, a life which turned out very differently from that of her beloved heroine Jo March....
| Author | Robert Gottlieb |
| ISBN | 1466827769 |
The strange and varied lives of the ten children of the world’s most beloved novelist
Charles Dickens, famous for the indelible child characters he created—from Little Nell to Oliver Twist and David Copperfield—was also the father of ten children (and a possible eleventh). What happened...
| Author | Elaine Showalter |
| ISBN | 0813520185 |
At the turn of the century, short stories by -- and often about -- "New Women" flooded the pages English and American magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the Yellow Book. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form and courageous in its candid representations of female sexuality,...
| Author | Oliver Bullough |
| ISBN | 0465074987 |
Russia is dying from within. Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy. Faced with staggering population decline—and near-certain economic collapse—driven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia...
| Author | Andrea Pitzer |
| ISBN | 1605984116 |
A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov's life and works — notably Pale Fire and Lolita — bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic authors.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then...
| Author | Alfred Habegger |
| ISBN | 0812966015 |
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography,...
| Author | Élisabeth Gille |
| ISBN | 1590174445 |
A New York Review Books Original
Élisabeth Gille was only five-years-old when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family,...
| Author | Rachel Polonsky |
| ISBN | 0571237800 |
When the British journalist Rachel Polonsky moves to Moscow, she discovers an apartment on Romanov Street that was once home to the Soviet elite. One of the most infamous neighbors was the ruthless apparatchik Vyacheslav Molotov, a henchman for Stalin who was a participant in the collectivizations...
| Author | Leon Edel |
| ISBN | 0006548687 |
This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist...
| Author | Anton Chekhov |
| ISBN | 0140449221 |
From his teenage years in provincial Russia, to his premature death in 1904, Anton Chekhov wrote thousands of letters to a wide range of correspondents. This fascinating new selection tells Chekhov's story as a man and a writer through affectionate bulletins to his family, insightful discussions...
| Author | Elaine Feinstein |
| ISBN | 1400033780 |
In this definitive biography of the legendary Russian poet, Elaine Feinstein draws on a wealth of newly available material–including memoirs, letters, journals, and interviews with surviving friends and family–to produce a revelatory portrait of both the artist and the woman.Anna Akhmatova...
| Author | Joseph Frank |
| ISBN | 0691013551 |
The term "biography" seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work...
Little Mother of Russia: A Biography of the Empress Marie Feodorovna (1847-1928)
| Author | Coryne Hall |
| ISBN | 0856831778 |
Empress Marie, born Princess Dagmar, was the daugher of King Christian IX of Denmark and sister of Queen Alexandra of Great Britain, Edward VII's wife. She was betrothed to Tsarevitch Nicholas of Russia, a love match on both sides, but tragically he died months before the wedding. A year later, out of...
| Author | Hugo Mager |
| ISBN | 0786705094 |
Had Elizabeth married the future Kaiser of Germany, as her grandmother so shrewdly desired, World War I might well have been deterred, and had she not arranged the marriage of her younger sister, Alexandra, to the man who became Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Revolution might have been averted. Modern...
| Author | Helen Azar |
| ISBN | 1594161771 |
In August 1914, Russia entered the First World War, and with it, the Imperial family of Tsar Nicholas II was thrust into a conflict from which they would not emerge. His eldest child, Olga Nikolaevna, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had begun a diary in 1905 when she was 10 years old and kept writing...
| Author | Selina Shirley Hastings |
| ISBN | 0241116848 |
A biography that captures both the hilarity and pathos of an extraordinary woman and a remarkable life.
Nancy Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the publication of her novels The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold...
| Author | Edvard Radzinsky |
| ISBN | 0743284267 |
Edvard Radzinsky is justly famous as both a biographer and a dramatist, and he brings both skills to bear in this vivid, page-turning, rich portrait of one of the greatest of all Romanovs. Alexander II was Russia's Lincoln -- he freed the serfs, promised a new, more liberal state for everyone, yet was...
Grushin's stunning debut drew praise that placed her in the top rank of young literary voices. Now she returns with that rarity: a second novel even more dazzling than her first.
The line: the universal symbol of scarcity and bureaucracy that exists wherever petty officials are let loose...
