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Tales of Italy by Maxim Gorky


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The Collected Poems


Sergei Yesenin - 1961
    and some chapters.Includes several color reproductions of landscape paintings by Isaac Levitan mounted on pages with captions, and other photos, including a portrait photo of Esenin and his wife Isadora Duncan, American dancer (v. 2, p. [7]).

Doctor Zhivago


Boris Pasternak - 1957
    One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.

Tales of the Mountains and Steppes


Chingiz Aitmatov - 1963
    1928) gained fame after the appearance of Jamila, his first major work. "Jamila is like one's first love, it cannot be experienced twice," Aitmatov wrote. The author's voice rings passionately in the story of a young teacher, the founder of the first school in a Kirghiz village (Duishen), it is gentle and sad as a young couple recall their lost love (To Have and to Lose), it is bold and powerful in telling the story of Tanabai Bakasov, a sheperd (Farewell, Gyulsary!). An inherent poetic quality unites all of Aitmatov's work. Thus does he speak of Kirghizia, with its boundless steppes, majestic mountain ranges and its people, who are so deeply attached to their native land.

The Sisters


Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy - 1922
    His Ordeal (1919-1941) is a book about the Russian people as they forge their way to a new life, about the Russian intelligentsia which, as a result of a long "ordeal", found its place in society. Tolstoy himself wrote of the plan behind his trilogy: "It's time to begin studying the Revolution, it's time for the artist to become a historian and a thinker... I not only acknowledge the Revolution - with such acknowledgement alone it would not be possible even to write a novel - I love its dark majesty, its world-wide scope. And that is the task of my novel - to create this majesty, this scope in all its complexity.

Tales from M. Saltykov-Shchedrin


Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin - 1981
    "The Mighty Bogatyr" and "The Eagle-Patron of Arts" are biting satires on autocracy; "The Crow That Went in Search of Truth" and "The Old Nag" picture the misery of the Peasants; the conceited lion of "Bears in Government" with his ludicrous "self-pawed" inscriptions, is a well-aimed thrust at the illiterate resolutions of Tsar Alexander III, while the Bruins in the same tale ridicule the woebegone ministers of tsarist Russia. But the message of the tales and the bitter truth conveyed in them go far beyond the limits of any one epoch, assuming ever new poignancy and actuality. "The sole object of my literary work," wrote Saltykov-Shchedrin, "was unfailingly to protest against greed, hypocrisy, falsehood, theft, treachery, stupidity..." The Tales, which he wrote during the last years of his life (1826-89), epitomize the entire work of the great satirist who did so much for the cause of revolutionary thought in Russia.

Kolyma Tales


Varlam Shalamov - 1966
    Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment


Harold Bloom - 1988
    Svidrigailov simply is the most memorable figure in the book, obscuring Raskolnikov, who after all is the protagonist, a hero-villain, and a kind of surrogate for Dostoevsky himself.

Duck Hunting


Aleksandr Vampilov - 1980
    He has come to detest his boring job and the petty superior he must defer to; his marriage is falling apart; he feels betrayed by his friends, he disdains the young student who offers him the passion and sense of wonder he once derived from his wife; and he seems concerned only with his annual hunting trip which, he hopes, will restore a purpose and identity to his life. But events continue to frustrate him: his wife aborts the child who might have saved their relationship; the new apartment they have wrested from the grudging bureaucracy seems more a tomb than a home; and ultimately, suicide appears to be Zilov's only alternative. But, in the end, emboldened by vodka and defying the persistent bad weather, Zilov does go hunting for the will to live is stronger than the desire to give up, and hope remains, even in the gray sameness of an existence gone stale.

We


Yevgeny Zamyatin - 1924
    In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression.

Oblomov


Ivan Goncharov - 1859
    Stephen Pearl's new translation, the first major English-language publication of Oblomov in more than fifty years, succeeds exquisitely to introduce this astonishing and endearing novel to a new generation of readers.

Old Peter's Russian Tales


Arthur Ransome - 1916
    Generation after generation has thrilled to the story of Baba Yaga, the witch with iron teeth; the tale of the Little Daughter of the Snow, who melted for lack of love, and many others. Ransome visited Russia before the Revolution and heard these stories first-hand from the people he met there.

Pather Panchali: Song of the Road


Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay - 1929
    It was followed in 1932 by a sequel Aparajito, which was later also adapted into a film of the same name by Satyajit Ray.

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Alexander Grin - 1949
    This collection contains the novels of russian soviet writer Alexander Grin (1880-1932): She Who Runs the Waves (1928)and the others

Envy


Yury Olesha - 1927
    Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn't mean he's grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.Marian Schwartz's new English translation of Envy brilliantly captures the energy of Olesha's masterpiece.A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

Great Russian Short Stories


Paul NegriLeo Tolstoy - 2003
    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.