Books in the Russian Library series

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, a novel by Yury Tynyanov, a leading figure of the Russian formalist school, describes the final year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, the author of the comedy Woe from Wit. As ambassador to Persia, Griboedov was savagely murdered in Tehran in 1829 in an attack on the Russian embassy.

The first English translation of this remarkable 1910 novel by Alexei Remizov, Sisters of the Cross is a masterpiece of early modernist fiction. It tell the story of a poor clerk who rebels against the suffering and humiliation afflicting his own life and the women he encounters in the tenement building where he lives in Petersburg.

Homeward from Heaven is Boris Poplavsky's masterpiece, written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, it recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.

Fandango and Other Stories presents a selection of essential short fiction by Alexander Grin, Russia's counterpart to Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alexandre Dumas. Grin's ingenious plots explore conflicts of the individual and society in a romantic world populated by a cast of eccentric, cosmopolitan characters.

Selected Nonfiction.

This anthology offers an introduction to New Russian Drama through plays that illustrate the versatility and global relevance of this exciting movement. Both politically and aesthetically uncompromising, they chart new paths for performance in the twenty-first century.

Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II-and it's a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one wonderfully vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it.

One of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, translated for the first time.

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova's work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.

This anthology offers an introduction to New Russian Drama through plays that illustrate the versatility and global relevance of this exciting movement. Both politically and aesthetically uncompromising, they chart new paths for performance in the twenty-first century.

Archpriest Avvakum's autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment, written in the 1660s and '70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been imprisoned by the tsar.

The tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. They showcase Nikolai Gogol's vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own.

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is among the most important pieces of writing to come out of Russia in the age of Catherine the Great. Alexander Radishchev's account of a fictional journey blends literature, philosophy, and political economy to expose social and economic injustices and their causes at all levels of Russian society.

Alexander Griboedov's Woe from Wit is one of the masterpieces of Russian drama. A verse comedy set in Moscow high society after the Napoleonic wars, it offers sharply drawn characters and clever repartee, mixing meticulously crafted banter and biting social critique.

Alexei Remizov was one of the greatest writers of the Russian Symbolist movement. In the thirteen stories collected in this volume, his exceptional stylistic achievements are on full display. The Little Devil and Other Stories includes works from across Remizov's career encompassing his thematic preoccupations and stylistic experimentation.

Among contemporary Russian writers, Yuz Aleshkovsky stands out for his vivid imagination, his mixing of realism and fantasy, and his virtuosic use of the rich tradition of Russian obscene language. Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage, two novels written in the 1970s, display Aleshkovsky's linguistic gifts and keen observations of Soviet life.

Necropolis is an unconventional literary memoir from Vladislav Khodasevich, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "the greatest Russian poet of our time." In each of the book's nine chapters, Khodasevich memorializes a significant figure of Russia's literary Silver Age, and in the process writes an insightful obituary of the era.

In the chaos of early 199s Russia, a paralyzed veteran's wife and stepdaughter conceal the Soviet Union's collapse from him in order to keep him-and his pension-alive, until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova's The Man Who Couldn't Die is an instant classic of post-Soviet Russian literature.

An unsung classic of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Karolina Pavlova's A Double Life alternates prose and poetry to offer a wry picture of Russian aristocratic society and vivid dreams of escaping its strictures.

Friedrich Gorenstein's Redemption is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin's police state in the aftermath of World War II. A major work bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.

Konstantin Batyushkov was one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian literature. Peter France interweaves Batyushkov's life and writings, presenting masterful new translations of his work with the compelling story of Batyushkov's career as a soldier, diplomat, and poet and his tragic decline into mental illness at the age of thirty-four.

An unsung gem of nineteenth-century Russian literature, City Folk and Country Folk is a satire of Russia's aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites in the 1860s. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, writing under a male pseudonym, centers her story on a common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter living on their small rural estate.

The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Ivlita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside members of a revolutionary cell, he must again ask: is he a free man or a pawn of history?Rapture is a fast-paced adventure-romance and a literary treat of the highest order. With a deceptively light hand, Iliazd entertains questions that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann once faced. How does the individual balance freedom and necessity, love and death, creativity and sterility? What is the role of violence in human history and culture? How does language both comfort and fail us in our postwar, post-Christian world?Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, Rapture was nearly lost to Russian and Western audiences. This translation rescues Laurence's surreal journey from the oblivion he, too, faces as he tries to outrun fate.

Sasha Sokolov is one of few writers to have been praised by Vladimir Nabokov, who called his first novel, A School for Fools, "e;an enchanting, tragic, and touching book."e; Sokolov's second novel, Between Dog and Wolf, written in 1980, has long intimidated translators because of its complex puns, rhymes, and neologisms. Language rather than plot motivates the story-the novel is often compared to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake-and time, characters, and death all prove unstable. The one constant is the Russian landscape, where the Volga is a more-crossable River Styx, especially when it freezes in winter. Sokolov's fiction has hugely influenced contemporary Russian writers. Now, thanks to Alexander Boguslawski's bold and superb translation, English readers can access what many consider to be his best work.

In this essential collection of Andrei Platonov's plays, the noted Platonov translator Robert Chandler edits and introduces The Hurdy-Gurdy (translated by Susan Larsen), Fourteen Little Red Huts (translated by Chandler), and Grandmother's Little Hut (translated by Jesse Irwin). Written in 1930 and 1933, respectively, The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts constitute an impassioned and penetrating response to Stalin's assault on the Soviet peasantry. They reflect the political urgency of Bertolt Brecht and anticipate the tragic farce of Samuel Beckett but play out through dialogue and characterization that is unmistakably Russian. This volume also includes Grandmother's Little Hut, an unfinished play that represents Platonov's later, gentler work.

Andrei Sinyavsky wrote Strolls with Pushkin while confined to Dubrovlag, a Soviet labor camp, smuggling the pages out a few at a time to his wife. His irreverent portrait of Pushkin outraged emigres and Soviet scholars alike, yet his "e;disrespect"e; was meant only to rescue Pushkin from the stifling cult of personality that had risen up around him. Anglophone readers who question the longstanding adoration for Pushkin felt by generations of Russians will enjoy tagging along on Sinyavsky's strolls with the great poet, discussing his life, fiction, and famously untranslatable poems. This new edition of Strolls with Pushkin also includes a later essay Sinyavsky wrote on the artist, "e;Journey to the River Black."e;

Mikhail Zoshchenko's Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. An original perspective on Soviet life and uproariously funny, Sentimental Tales at last shows Anglophone readers why Zoshchenko is considered among the greatest humorists of the Soviet era.