In exile, they worked as taxi drivers, labourers and film extras, and wrote some of the most brilliant and imaginative works of Russian literature.This new collection includes stories by the most famous émigré writers, Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, and introduces powerful lesser known voices, some of whom have never been available in English before. Here is Yuri Felsen's evocative, impressionistic account of a night of debauchery in Paris; Teffi's witty and timely reflections on refugee experience; and Mark Aldanov's sparkling story of an elderly astrologer who unexpectedly finds himself in Hitler's bunker in Berlin. Exploring displacement, loss and new beginnings, their short stories vividly evoke the experience of life in exile and also return obsessively to the Russia that has been left behind - whether as a beautiful dream or terrifying nightmare. By turns experimental, funny, exciting, poignant and haunting, these works reveal the full range of émigré writing and are presented here in masterly translations by Bryan Karetnyk and others.

    His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work.

    He is credited with writing some of the greatest novels of all time; a compatriot of Tolstoy and a contemporary of Dickens, his struggle for recognition was long and difficult. He suffered from severe epilepsy and an addiction to gambling, and in 1849 was only moments away from execution before he received a reprieve and was instead imprisoned in Siberia.In his writing he offended and delighted in equal measure, recounting his own experience of prison with dark humour and wit in The House of the Dead and never losing his fascination with real-life crime. His novels ranged from the gritty social realism of Crime and Punishment to the fantasy of The Double, as well as the world-renowned Brothers Karamazov.From revolutionary to reactionary, enemy of the state to tutor of the Tsar’s children, Dostoyevsky’s story is one of turbulent change and contradiction. This biography explores his life and work, recounting his personal struggles with deadlines, debt, marriage and memories, and revisiting and revitalising his outstanding contribution to literature and how his writing is reflected and translated in the media today.