As the other man lies dying, the young soldier takes his horse and rides away. Years later, as a grown man in Paris whose life is still haunted by the murder he committed all that time ago, he comes across a story by a writer calling himself "Alexander Wolf", which recounts in astonishing detail the events of that day in 1919 from the dying victim's point of view. As he attempts to find the elusive writer, the narrator becomes involved in a series of strange encounters that lead him to question life, death and his own identity.Originally published in Russian in 1947-8 in the Russian-language New York periodical The New Review, and published now by Pushkin Press in its first new English translation since 1950, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is an early postmodern classic that stands alongside the best work by Vladimir Nabokov and Paul Auster.

    Inspired by the extravagant yarns of a straight-faced former cavalry officer, Hieronymus von Munchhausen, the best-selling legend quickly eclipsed the real-life baron who helped the Russians fight the Turks. Galloping across continents and centuries, the mythical Munchausen s Travels went through hundreds of editions of increasing length and luxuriance. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Russian modernist master of the unsettling and the uncanny, also took certain liberties with the mythical baron. In this phantasmagoric roman a clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen dauntlessly upholds his old motto Truth in lies, while remaining a fierce champion of his own imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron and self-taught philosopher has agreed to return to Russia, Lenin s Russia, undercover. This reluctant secret agent has come out of retirement to engage with the real world.

    Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognised as among the finest ever written.In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the author's work with the historical context to form an illuminating and often surprising whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the reader in a grand vista of Dostoevsky's world: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsar's fortress to the refined salons of St Petersburg. Along the way, Christofi relates the stories of the three women whose lives were so deeply intertwined with Dostoevsky's: the consumptive widow Maria; the impetuous Polina who had visions of assassinating the Tsar; and the faithful stenographer Anna, who did so much to secure his literary legacy.Reading between the lines of his fiction, Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life - and literary stardom - not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.

    Maimed beyond recognition by a tank explosion, he spends weeks on end locked inside his apartment, his sole companions the vodka bottles spilling from the refrigerator. But soon Kostya’s comfortable—if dysfunctional—cocoon is torn open when he receives a visit from his army buddies who are mobilized to locate a missing comrade. Through this search for his missing friend, Kostya is able to find himself.

    "This drowsy denison of the realms of the Pharaohs will do us no harm." And he remained by the tank. What is more, he took his glove and began tickling the crocodile's nose with it, wishing, as he said afterwards, to induce him to snort.Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky is best known for his exploration of the human dark side of the psyche, but this collection shows he is equally adept at sarcastic and absurdist commentary.

    In Russia to this day Lenin inspires adulation. Everywhere, he continues to fascinate as a man who made history, and who created a new kind of state that would later be imitated by nearly half the countries in the world.Lenin believed that the 'the political is the personal', and while in no way ignoring his political life, Sebestyen focuses on Lenin the man - a man who loved nature almost as much as he loved making revolution, and whose closest ties and friendships were with women. The long-suppressed story of his ménage a trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a different character to the coldly one-dimensional figure of legend.Told through the prism of Lenin's key relationships, Sebestyen's lively biography casts a new light on the Russian Revolution, one of the great turning points of modern history.

    What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today's Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

    This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish childhood, to the relatively non-Jewish world of his collection of stories entitled 'Red Cavalry'. Babel's masterpiece, 'Red Cavalry' is the most dramatic expression of his dualism and in his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of his heritage heralds the great American-Jewish writers from Henry Roth to Saul Bellow to Philip Roth.

    Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him - a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover.

    On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.

    It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting, he is at once a victim, a monster, a silly hypocrite, and a sadistic dullard. The plot moves from Peredonov’s petty quest for a promotion to arson and murder via one of the most incredible and uproarious scandal scenes in world literature, the masquerade ball, which the boy Sasha attends as a beautiful geisha. Even in its censored form, it is one of the most provocative and sexually open of Russian books. Sologub removed many passages which would have been unacceptable at the time of publication. In this edition these censored sections are appended, and all are keyed so that the reader can place them in the novel as it was written.

    When traditional family expectations and increasing religious and cultural tension threaten to shatter their bond, Marat and Patya struggle to overcome obstacles determined to keep them apart, while fate seems destined to keep them together—until the very end.

    Some of the stories here were collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four of the greatest writers in Russian literature: Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov, Andrey Platonov, and Alexander Pushkin, author of Eugene Onegin, the classic Russian novel in verse. Among the many classic stories included here are the tales of Baba Yaga, Vasilisa the Beautiful, Father Frost, and the Frog Princess.

    There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry. One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

    Expanding the literary universe spun in his earlier novels, Vodolazkin explores music and fame, belonging and purpose, time and eternity. At the stunning finale of Brisbane, all the carefully knit stitches unravel into a riddle: Whose story is it – the subject’s or the writer’s? Are art and love really no match for death? Is Brisbane, the city of our dreams, our only hope for the future?