It is 1918 in S-, a small town not far from Moscow. Rozanov and his family have fled the capital because of food shortages and political unrest. In S- Rozanov nearly completes a manuscript he has been working on in secret—Polina. Polina is Apollinaria Suslova, Dostoevsky’s mistress in the 1860s and later Rozanov’s first wife. When they split up, she makes it clear that he is never to write about their relationship under any circumstances. But now, circumstances being what they are, he pins...

The classic novel of a boy's struggle for survival in WWII Poland, from the National Book Award–winning author of Steps and Being There."In 1939, a six-year-old boy is sent by his anti-Nazi parents to a remote village in Poland where they believe he will be safe. Things happen, however, and the boy is left to roam the Polish countryside. . . . To the blond, blue-eyed peasants in this part of the country, the swarthy, dark-eyed boy who speaks the d...

First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara, the very embodiment of the pai...

In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternak's masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life.Considered the greatest short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressi...

A woman's true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: "Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it."— The New York Times Book ReviewIn the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin's reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist...

Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on socia...

Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor while others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions. With the brutal winter fast approaching, Tolya Bogomolov, a young mathematician serving a three-year sentence, hopes an acquaintance he’s been cultivating will lead to a less brutal w...

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises i...

This beautiful collection of 13 classic Chekhov short stories is the perfect introduction to an icon of Russian literature.“The greatest short story writer who has ever lived.” —Raymond ChandlerWithout doubt one of the greatest observers of human nature in all its messy complexity, Chekhov’s short stories are exquisite masterpieces in miniature. His work ranged from the light-hearted comic tales of his early years to some of the most aching...

A "creatively captivating and intellectually challenging" existential mystery from the great Polish author—"sly, funny, and . . . lovingly translated" ( The New York Times).Winner of the 1967 International Prize for LiteratureMilan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz "one of the great novelists of our century." Now his most famous novel, Cosmos, is available in a critically acclaimed translation by the award-winning translato...

A selection of the finest short stories from “one of the most popular writers in Russia,” praised by many as the female Chekhov (The New York Times)Teffi's genius with the short form made her a literary star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. These stories, taken from the whole of her career, show the full range of her gifts. Extremely funny—a wry, scathing observer of societ...