Russian Literature

An unsuccessful writer and an inveterate alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov is running out of money and has recently divorced from his wife Tatyana, who intends to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha. The prospect of a summer job as a tourist...
By: Sergei Dovlatov

Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stays on longer than intended, Rudin exerts a strong...
By: Ivan Turgenev

On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancée Tatyana. However, a chance encounter with his old flame, the...
By: Ivan Turgenev

Set against the backdrop of the Pugachov rebellion against Catherine the Great, The Captain’s Daughter was Pushkin’s only completed novel and remains one of his most popular works. The inexperienced and impetuous young nobleman Pyotr Grinyev is sent...
By: Alexander Pushkin

The civil servant Ivan Matveyich and his wife Elena Ivanovna are spectators of an exhibition – in a shopping arcade – of a crocodile owned by a German, when Ivan is suddenly swallowed alive by the animal. Unsuccessful in his attempts to be freed...
By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

In The Death of a Civil Servant , an administrative clerk accidentally sneezes on a hierarchical superior at the opera, which results in great embarrassment and hilarious and futile attempts at atonement. The other short stories included in this...
By: Anton Chekhov

The judge Ivan Ilyich Golovin has spent his life in the pursuit of wealth and status, devoting himself obsessively to work and often neglecting his family in the process. When, after a small accident, he fails to make the expected recovery, it...
By: Leo Tolstoy

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the...
By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country’s poultry stocks, Persikov’s discovery is exploited...
By: Mikhail Bulgakov