Anton Chekhov remarked toward the close of his life that people would stop reading him a year after his death. But his literary stature and popularity have grown steadily with the years, and he is accounted the single most important influence on the devel
My Universities, the last part of Gorky's great autobiographical trilogy, covers the years from 1884 to 1888 when he was a raw teen-age youth, intensely excited and as intensely disappointed by the book of life as he found it among the flotsam and jetsam,
Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gor
In My Apprenticeship, Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) gives an exact account of his own adolescence. After the death of his mother, fourteen-year-old Alexei Peshkov ( Gorky ) sets out to earn his own living. First he is the errand boy in a shoe shop; then, in tur
This compelling 1902 play, considered Gorky's masterpiece, centers on a group of wretched souls who congregate to play cards, tell stories, and debate whether it is better to live without illusions or to maintain a romanticized worldview. A powerful, infl
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 Lad
Here is an extraordinary collection of the world’s best literary espionage, selected by Alan Furst, a contemporary master of the genre. The Book of Spies brings us the aristocratic intrigues of The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which French émigrés duel with
Three short stories from the great Russian writer, including the title story, in which a thieving vagrant takes on a young, unwilling apprentice; "Twenty-six Men and A Girl," widely regarded as Gorky’s best short story, which describes how a wretched cr
