A haunting Russian tale about the environmental legacy of the Cold War. Yerzhan grows up in a remote part of Kazakhstan where the Soviets tests atomic weapons. As a young boy he falls in love with the neighbour's daughter and one evening, to impress her,
Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war. Completed
People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection--coming home as in "The Return, "leaving home as in "Rubbish Wind, " traveling far away from their country as in "The Locks of Epiphan"--trying to improve their lives and those of others, search
From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - i
In this powerful and brutal short story, Leskov demonstrates the enduring truth of the Shakespearean archetype joltingly displaced to the heartland of Russia. Chastened and stifled by her marriage of convenience to a man twice her age, the young Katerina
Pushkin's version of the historical novel in the style of Walter Scott, this final prose work also reflects his fascination with and research into Russian history of the 18th century. During the reign of Catherine the Great, the young Grinev sets out for
A New York Review Books OriginalThe Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision h
Moscow in the 1930s is the consummate symbol of the Soviet paradise, a fairy-tale capital where, in Stalin's words, "life has become better, life has become merrier". In Happy Moscow Platonov exposes the gulf between this premature triumphalism and the
For fans of fairy tales and the literary supernatural: a unique collection of Russian short stories from the last 200 years In these folk tales, young women go on long and perilous quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese, and tsars ask danger
