We Never Make Mistakes: Two Short Novels
10 best books like We Never Make Mistakes: Two Short Novels (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn): Twenty Letters to a Friend, Within the Whirlwind, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag, Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag, Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, Selected Stories, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, Midnight in the Century, Scenes from the Bathhouse: And Other Stories of Communist Russia, The Fierce and Beautiful World
Twenty Letters to a Friend
| Author | Svetlana Alliluyeva |
| ISBN | 0060100990 |
In this riveting, New York Times-bestselling memoir—first published by Harper in 1967—Svetlana Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s critically acclaimed biography, Stalin’s Daughter, describes the surreal experience of growing up in the Kremlin in the shadow of her father,...
| Author | Evgenia Ginzburg |
| ISBN | 0156976498 |
It wasn't easy to finish this book. After reading "Into the Whirlwind" it was hard to bear more blows to Eugenia's life: one guard sends her back to tree felling, the other one on a walk across the taiga, a walk that lets her contemplate suicide. But the rewards of going all the way to the last page were stunning....
| Author | David King |
| ISBN | 0805052941 |
The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase memories off his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict...
| Author | Jan Tomasz Gross |
| ISBN | 0691130833 |
During the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to...
| Author | Alexander Dolgun |
| ISBN | 0394494970 |
Alexander Dolgun, from embassy employee, to prisoner, then falsely convicted of being a terrorist against Russia and sentenced to hard labor. Released after eight long years he is finally able to recount the experience of being transported to and between prisons, interactions and friendships with...
| Author | Nikolai Gogol |
| ISBN | 0140449078 |
Gogol's detailed, breathlessly sarcastic and mean spirited story telling is a joy to read.
Unfortunately some stories stop abruptly with no decent pay off for the gloriousness before it: The Carriage has an obvious and anti-climatic finale and The Government Inspector didn't finish as grandly...
| 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...
In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin’s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century, Serge’s searching novel about revolutionaries...
| Author | Mikhail Zoshchenko |
| ISBN | 0472060708 |
Scenes from the Bathhouse, Mikhail Zoshchenko
عنوانها: طالع نحس : گزیده داستانهای کوتاه؛ حمامها و آدمها: گزیده داستانهای کوتاه؛ نویسنده: میخاییل زوشنکو؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش:...
| Author | Andrei Platonov |
| ISBN | 0940322331 |
This collection of Platonov's short fiction brings together seven works drawn from the whole of his career. It includes the harrowing novella Dzahn ("Soul"), in which a young man returns to his Asian birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech, and "The...
| 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 | Yury Dombrovsky |
| ISBN | 1860463436 |
Dombrovsky's tale of an exiled intellectual who, in the far province of Alma-Ata, becomes an archeologist and is arrested and interrogated by a Stalinist prosecutor (who will later himself become a target of the Great Terror), is largely autobiographical. It is also vivid and courageous fiction,...
| Author | Maxim Gorky |
| ISBN | 0486406520 |
This follows the story of a young man(Gavrila) who is looking for work down the shipyard/docks. He's looking to earn enough money to travel back to his hometown. He comes across the town drunkard, Chelkash, and Chelkash offers him a job. Not asking any questions, the man agrees and they set out in boat...
Son domaine c’était les nuages. Sur toute l’étendue immense de l’URSS, les avions avaient besoin de ses prévisions pour atterrir, les navires pour se frayer un chemin à travers les glaces, les tracteurs pour labourer les terres noires. Dans la conquête de l’espace commençante, ses...
When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption
| Author | Wesley Adamczyk |
| ISBN | 0226004449 |
Often overlooked in accounts of World War II is the Soviet Union's quiet yet brutal campaign against Polish citizens, a campaign that included, we now know, war crimes for which the Soviet and Russian governments only recently admitted culpability. Standing in the shadow of the Holocaust, this episode...
Заповедник - Авторский сборник
I love this book, the author, the whole ironic "almost dissident" voice. Funny and compassionate, the writer Boris Alikhanov (based on Dovlatov) cannot get published in Soviet Russia. He has left his wife and daughter to work as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve, staffed by very strange devotees...
| Author | Tom Stoppard |
| ISBN | 0802140041 |
Voyage is the first part of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who came of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term intelligentsia was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge...
| Author | Vladimir Voinovich |
| ISBN | 1585678112 |
Vojnovič racconta la politica e la società russa della seconda metà del novecento a partire da vicende che vedono protagonisti alcuni abitanti di Dolgov, una cittadina di provincia. L’attenzione è focalizzata soprattutto su Revkina Aglaja Stepanovna, militante del PCUS dalla prima ora,...
| Author | Karlo Štajner |
| ISBN | 0552134864 |
This is a curious book,
a victim of Stalin's purge, the author spent 18 years in Siberian labor camps and prisons.
He was starved, beaten, and grossly overworked.
He states at the beginning that he wrote the book "without analysis",
but doesn't say why he made this choice.
...
