Chastened and stifled by her marriage of convenience to a man twice her age, the young Katerina Lvovna goes yawning about the house, missing the barefoot freedom of her childhood, until she meets the feckless steward Sergei Filipych. Sergei proceeds to seduce Katerina, as he has done half the women in the town, not realizing that her passion, once freed, will attach to him so fiercely that Katerina will do anything to keep hold of him. Journalist and prose writer Nikolai Leskov is known for his powerful characterizations and the quintessentially Russian atmosphere of his stories.

    But the forest is gradually emptying as more and more people leave to settle in villages, where they break their backs tilling the land to grow wheat for their “bread” (which Leemet has been told tastes horrible) and where they pray to a god very different from the spirits worshipped in the forest’s sacred grove. With lothario bears who wordlessly seduce women, a giant louse with a penchant for swimming, a legendary flying frog, and a young charismatic viper named Ints, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a totally inventive novel for readers of David Mitchell, Sjón, and Terry Pratchett.

    Twelve powerful works of fiction, including Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades," Gogol's "The Overcoat," Turgenev's "The District Doctor," Dostoyevsky's "White Nights," Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does a Man Need?," plus "The Clothes Mender" by Leskov, "The Lady with the Toy Dog" by Chekhov, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Gorky, "Lazarus" by Andreyev, and more.

    Who is suitable for work in the Russian intelligence services? A former intelligence officer wrote a novel about testing people working for this the most powerful intelligence service under Stalin and Beriia.

    Here is a story of a great civilization made human, played out through the lives of four families who are divided by ethnicity but united in shaping the destiny of their land.

    Veronica is an aspiring historian living in present-day Los Angeles when she meets a mysterious man who may be heir to the Russian throne. As she sets about investigating the legitimacy of his claim through a winding path of romance and deception, the ghosts of her own past begin to haunt her. Lena, a servant in the imperial Russian court of 1902, is approached by the desperate Empress Alexandra. After conceiving four daughters, the Empress is determined to sire a son and believes Lena can help her. Once elevated to the Romanov's treacherous inner circle, Lena finds herself under the watchful eye of the meddling Dowager Empress Marie. Charlotte, a former ballerina living in World War II occupied Paris, receives a surprise visit from a German officer. Determined to protect her son from the Nazis, Charlotte escapes the city, but not before learning that the officer's interest in her stems from his longstanding obsession with the fate of the Russian monarchy. Then as Veronica's passion intensifies, and her search for the true heir to the throne takes a dangerous turn, the reader learns just how these three vastly different women are connected. The Secret Daughter of the Tsar is thrilling from its first intense moments until its final, unexpected conclusion.

    Yes, I am well.... It would be better if I were ill, it's worse as it is. A dream keeps creeping into my mind, and I cannot get away from it. I try to think--I can't collect my thoughts, I try to pray--but I can't get free by prayer. My lips murmur the words but my heart is far away; as though the evil one were whispering in my ear, and always of such wicked things. And such thoughts rise up within me, that I'm ashamed of myself. What is wrong with me? There's some trouble, something before me! At night I do not sleep, Varia, a sort of murmur haunts me; someone seems speaking so tenderly to me, as it were cooing to me like a dove.

    Here, we can walk down western Russia's country roads, rest in its villages, and explore some of the most engaging cities in the world. Beautifully written and infinitely insightful, Among the Russians is vivid, compelling travel writing that will also appeal to readers of history and current events—and to anyone captivated by the shape and texture of one of the world's most enigmatic culture.

    Her husband, however, possesses no such grace, and he rules Moscow as he does his wife, with a cold, hard fist.For Pavel and his bride, though, living in Sankt Peterburg means sharing a crowded cellar with other families, and being barely able to afford bread. Nevertheless, they are full of optimism, for their grandparents were serfs and this young couple is the first to leave the countryside to seek a better existence.However, after an explosive confrontation between peaceful demonstrators and tsarist soldiers, the lives of Ella and Pavel take two very different turns, but the fire of revolutionary Russia eventually links their fates forever.Robert Alexander once again masterfully combines the power of true history and riveting storytelling to bring this fascinating and legendary period to life.

    - TIMEA mixture of mockery and prophecy, the book savaged every ideology and religion while foreseeing both the Holocaust and Hiroshima. (Ehrenburg himself predicted the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union to the day -- his intimacy with history always bordered on the telepathic.) - Richard Lourie, The NY Times, August 25, 1996The book deals with the adventures of a Mexican dreamer Julio Jurenito and his wanderings about Europe along with his seven disciples (Ehrenburg himself is the first disciple and the author-narrator).The novel includes authentic characters, such as Mayakovski, Picasso, Chaplin, and Tatlin. This is a biting satire of the European postwar civilization. This extraordinarily sneering book is a modernized Candide, covering Soviet Russia and the European West, after the stress of the WWI years.Its main character Jurenito (he is supposed to be a portrait of the famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera) and his Negro servant travel, observe, comment, and make the reader roar with laughter at the idiotic inconsistencies of capitalist civilization. A prolific and smart journalist by nature, Ehrenburg combines a satirical vein with a snappy, terse language, and a flair for topical themes with very unsentimental eroticism.Julio Jurenito will probably remain the most vivid illustration, not just in Russian but in the whole of European literature, of the post-WWI sentiments of the harassed western intelligentsia. In this book there is everything: sophistication, cynicism, trenchant satire, sentimental lyricism, and the gay abandon of despair. All this combined makes a brilliant firework of paradoxes, subtle observations of the life of the European bourgeoisie, and sarcastic details. It may be called a confession, a pamphlet, a grotesque, or a poem.source: http://www.elkost.com/ilya_ehrenburg/...

    Sea-devil has appeared in the Rio de la Plata. Weird cries out at sea, slashed fishermen's nets, glimpses of a most queer creature astride a dolphin leave no room for doubt. The Spaniard Zurita, greed overcoming his superstition, tries to catch Sea-devil and force it to pearl-dive for him but fails. On a lonely stretch of shore, not far from Buenos Aires, Dr. Salvator lives in seclusion behind a high wall, whose steel-plated gates only open to let in his Indian patients. The Indians revere him as a God but Zurita has a hunch that the God on land and the devil in the sea have something in common. Enlisting the help of two wily Araucanian brothers he sets out to probe the mystery. As action shifts from the bottom of the sea to the Spaniard's schooner The Jellyfish and back again, with interludes in sun-drenched Buenos Aires and countryside, the mystery of Ichthyander the sea-devil is unfolded before the reader in a narrative as gripping as it informative.

    Elena, born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, finds her passion in the complexity of the English language - but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena's home is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars. Instead, it is a nation humiliated by its first faltering steps after World War II, putting up appearances for the sake of its regime and fighting to retain its pride. In this deeply affecting memoir, Elena re-creates the world that both oppressed and inspired her. She recounts stories passed down to her about the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and probes the daily deprivations and small joys of her family's bunkerlike existence. Through Elena's captivating voice, we learn not only the personal story of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose love of a foreign language finally transports her to a new world. 'This moving memoir made me cry' The New York Times

    It portrays a fallen provincial world reminiscent of the town of N found in Gogol's Dead Souls, a place populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious, and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of socialist realist novels.

    It was not until he discovered 30,000 victims were massacred by Nazi forces in his hometown of Berdichev - including his own mother - that he confronted his own Jewishness and the genocidal horror of the Holocaust. Determined to tell the story of Soviet complicity with the Nazi extermination of Russian Jewry, Grossman was labeled an enemy of the state by both Stalin and Khrushchev - barely escaping Stalin's death squads - and his exposes were suppressed and buried deep within the Communist Party's archives. For nearly thirty years Grossman's writings - including a fictional treatment of the Berdichev massacre in his novel Life and Fateremained hidden from the world, little known outside of a small circle of Russian dissidents. Finally published in the late 1980s, they provided crucial ammunition to those fighting to overthrow the Soviet regime in 1991. Now, drawing on archival materials that have become available only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, John Garrard and Carol Garrard have written an eloquent biography of Vasily Grossman. More than just a vivid portrait of a writer's life in a totalitarian, anti-Semitic state, The Bones of Berdichev provides new evidence concerning the origins of the Holocaust itself. The authors show how the Holocaust began not in the ghettos and death camps of Poland, but on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, with the knowledge and cooperation of many Soviet citizens who aided and profited from the murder of their Jewish neighbors. The Soviet authorities in turn suppressed those actions - providing chilling evidence to support Grossman's conclusion that the two formerly warring German and Soviet totalitarian states were in fact mirror images of each other.

    Fear, corruption and treachery abound in this political satire set in the aftermath of Stalin's death in the Soviet Union in 1953. When the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, has a stroke—the political gears begin to turn, plunging the super-state into darkness, uncertainty and near civil war. The struggle for supreme power will determine the fate of the nation and of the world. And it all really happened.