It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam.

    Here, in the largest one-volume collection available, are 36 stories of war, intrigue, treachery, murder, moral turmoil, spiritual anguish, and occasional redemption. They include early stories like the famed "Sevastopol" tales of warfare and "Lost on the Steppe;" the tour de force novellas "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch" and "The Kreutzer Sonata;" as well as folk tales, parables, realistic tales, and many lesser-known gems.