Russian Literature

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Supreme masterpiece recounts in feverish, compelling tones the story of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student tormented by his own thoughts after he brutally murders an old woman. Overwhelmed afterwards by guilt and terror, Raskolnikov confesses and goes to prison. There he realizes that happiness and redemption can only be achieved through suffering. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

The Master and the Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

The White Guard

Mikhail Bulgakov

<p><b>Discover Mikhail Bugakov's classic literary love letter to the city of Kyiv.</b> <p>Drawing closely on Bulgakov's personal experiences of the horrors of civil war as a young doctor, <i>The White Guard</i> takes place in Kyiv, 1918, a time of turmoil and suffocating uncertainty as the Bolsheviks, Socialists and Germans fight for control of the city. It tells the story of the Turbins, a once-wealthy Russian family, as they are forced to come to terms with revolution and a new regime. <p>Bulgakov's first novel, <i>The White Guard</i> is one of the greatest works of twentieth century Russian literature. As epic a chronicle of life and death in the Russian Empire as <i>War and Peace</i>. <p><b>'The tumultuous atmosphere of the Ukrainian revolution and civil war is brilliantly evoked' <i>Daily Telegraph</i></b></p>

A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov

Oblomov

Ivan Goncharov

A Gentle Creature

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Cossacks

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.

Selected Poems

Anna Akhmatova

The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels

Nina Berberova

Petersburg Tales

Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol

The Nose

Nikolai Gogol

The Shooting Party

Anton Chekhov

The Eye

Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin

Valdimir Nabokov

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.<br/><br/>“Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune<br/><br/>Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.<br/><br/>Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.

The Double and the Gambler

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from a Dead House

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Adolescent

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Demons

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky