Masterful stories of faith and superstition from a much-loved Russian author, in English for the first time 'A magnificent edition of the works of a writer who deserves her seat at the top table of Russian authors' Sara Wheeler, Wall Street Journal These stories conjure a vanished Russia, where Orthodox Christianity coexists with the shapeshifters and house spirits of ancient folk belief. Celebrated for her sublime wit and graceful style, Teffi here plumbs the darker aspects of psychology,...

Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet.Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African” he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former s...

In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini meet in Salzburg where they agree on a renewed assault on the Soviet Union. Launched in the summer, the campaign soon picks up speed, as the routed Red Army is driven back to the industrial center of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. In the rubble of the bombed-out city, Soviet forces dig in for a last stand.The story told in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters i...

This classic of Russian literature plunges readers into a fascinating moment in military history as it follows an unforgettable cast of characters during the Pugachev Rebellion.“Time has done nothing to dull the excitement of the story.” —The New York TimesAlexander Pushkin’s short novel is set during the reign of Catherine the Great, when the Cossacks rose up in rebellion against the Russian empress. Presented as the memoir of Pyo...

A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story.Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the st...

An enthralling, elegant, emotional account of a journey into exile, by the wonderful Teffi Moscow, 1918. Following the Revolution, people are leaving the city in droves - bound for the Black Sea, and from there to Europe and beyond. In late autumn, the celebrated writer Teffi is invited on a reading tour; having elegantly navigated the bureaucratic waters for her visa, she spends the winter travelling from Moscow to Kiev, and from there to Odessa and on to Novorossisk, first by train and t...

Ranging from portraits of Rasputin and Lenin to observations on the Russian Revolution, and from profiles of cultural figures to moving domestic scenes, this short collection includes writings by the inimitable Teffi never before published in English. Everything is here - politics, society, art and literature, love and family life - and all is told in Teffi's multifaceted style: amusing, sincerely moving, ironic and always honest, pervaded by an intensely felt understanding of humanity's s...

An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominan...

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 - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie,...

Stories about the occult, folk religions, superstition, and spiritual customs in Russia by one of the most essential twentieth-century writers of short fiction and essays.Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a writer of great range and human sympathy. The stories on otherworldly themes in this collection are some of her finest and most profound, displaying the acute psychological sensitivity beneath her chara...

Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In prerevolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 30s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris, recalling her unforgettable encounters with Rasputin, and her hopeful visit at age thirteen to Tolstoy after reading War and Peace. In this selection of her...

Winner of the Anna Balakian Prize 2016Is poetry lost in translation, or is it perhaps the other way around? Is it found? Gained? Won? What happens when a poet decides to give his favorite Russian poems a new life in English? Are the new texts shadows, twins or doppelgangers of their originals-or are they something completely different? Does the poet resurrect himself from the death of the author by reinterpreting his own work in another language, or does he turn in...