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Russian books
29
items Best Russian books I've ever read. Not all are included here, but these are the most remarkable
Sergei Dovlatov’s subtle, dark-edged humor and wry observations
The Suitcase (novel)
satirical novelization of Dovlatov’s time as a prison guard for the Soviet Army in the early 1960s
The Zone: 9781847493576: Amazon.com: Books
a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and i...
The Foundation Pit
A sort of Soviet Don Quixote, this novel about a craftsman who wanders the U.S.S.R. hoping to ease human misery with his inventions
Chevengur
Moscow Chestnova is a bold and glamorous girl, a beautiful parachutist who grew up with the Revolution. As an orphan, she knew tough times—but things are changing now. Comrade Stalin has proclaimed that “Life has become better! Life has become merrie...
Happy Moscow by Andrei Platonov | Goodreads
Everything is subordinated to two main requirements— humanitarian ideals and fidelity to life. This is the secret of the marvellous simplicity of Russian literary art.
Greatest Russian Stories
Fifty thought-provoking narratives that explore the human condition.
The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
ironic parable on power and its corruption, on good and evil, and on human frailty and the strength of love
The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
The book is a satirical examination of one of the goals of the October Revolution of 1917: to create a new breed of man, uncorrupted by the past and above petit bourgeois concerns
Heart of a Dog
Anton Chekhov also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels.
The Complete Short Novels
Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.
Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)
In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.
Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics)
tale of patricide and family rivalry that embodies the moral and spiritual dissolution of an entire society
The Brothers Karamazov
the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin— known as the “idiot”—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the be...
The Idiot (Penguin Clothbound Classics)
literary tapestry interwoven with themes of transient beauty, the ache of solitude, and the illusory nature of human connection
White Nights
War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfi...
War and Peace (Vintage Classics)
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky
Anna Karenina
intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage Classics)
The exhilarating dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell's 1984 and foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia
We
In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. Volume...
The Gulag Archipelago Trilogy + 1984
When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith."
Fathers and Sons (Oxford World's Classics)
The first example of the psychological novel in Russia
A Hero of Our Time (Penguin Classics)
Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution
Doctor Zhivago (Vintage International)
supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale
Dead Souls
Written with sympathetic humor and compassion, this masterful portrait of upper-class decline
Oblomov (Penguin Classics)
epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century
Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics)
novel written by Maxim Gorky in 1906 about revolutionary factory workers
Mother Annotated
Uncle Vanya: Scenes From Country Life In Four Acts is a classic play written by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov in 1898 that delves into the lives of a group of characters living on a rural Russian estate and revolves around their discontent, unfulf...
Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life