Best of russian classic lit

White Nights (Penguin Little Black Classics)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2017

'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?' A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2021

Notes from Underground & The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2017

<p>Notes from Underground presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator. It is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel.The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical novel, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The Dead and Notes from the Dead House (or Notes from a Dead House). The book is a loosely-knit collection of facts, events and philosophical discussion organized by "theme" rather than as a continuous story. Dostoyevsky himself spent four years in exile in such a camp following his conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle. This experience allowed him to describe with great authenticity the conditions of prison life and the characters of the convicts.Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. His literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.<br></p>

A Gentle Creature and Other Stories

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 2009

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Penguin Little Black Classics)

Leo Tolstoy · 2016

A Gentle Creature

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2020

The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2003

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's powerful meditation on faith, meaning and morality, The Brothers Karamazov is translated with an introduction and notes by David McDuff in Penguin Classics.<br/><br/>When brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky's dark masterpiece evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.<br/><br/>This powerful translation of The Brothers Karamazov features and introduction highlighting Dostoyevsky's recurrent themes of guilt and salvation, with a new chronology and further reading.<br/><br/>“There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov.”—Joyce Carol Oates<br/><br/>“Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life.”—Friedrich Nietzsche<br/><br/>“The most magnificent novel ever written.”—Sigmund Freud

Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1993

<b>Hailed by <i>Washington Post Book World</i> as “the best [translation] currently available" when it was first published, this second edition of <i>Crime and Punishment </i>has been updated in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. • <b>ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME</b></b><br><br>With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of <i>Crime and Punishment, </i>Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel. <br><br>In <i>Crime and Punishment</i>, when Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is almost unequalled in world literature for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision. Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

War and Peace (Vintage Classics)

Leo Tolstoy · 2008

From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the best-selling, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, comes a brilliant, engaging, and eminently readable translation of Leo Tolstoy’s master epic. • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read<br/><br/>War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.<br/><br/>Pevear and Volokhonsky have brought us this classic novel in a translation remarkable for its fidelity to Tolstoy’s style and cadence and for its energetic, accessible prose.

Anna Karenina (Wordsworth Classics)en

Leo Tolstoy · 1997

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels,- of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that evokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy in life's many ephemeral pleasures, and a profusion of comic relief.