Русская литература Читай Город

The Karamazov Brothers is the greatest passionate philosophical novel in the Russian literature that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality.Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha present the very tenets on which life gets lived, or even more, passed on. The impulsive and emotional Dmitri, the calculative and intelligent Ivan and the naive and spiritual Alyosha represent the microcosm of a society which wagers war on the name of religion, status, power, values and ideals!The Karamazov Brothers, completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise.

A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author’s wish and with his full co-operation.

A man wakes up in hospital. He has no idea who he is or how he came to be there. The doctor tells him his name, but he doesn't remember it. He remembers nothing.As memories slowly resurface, he begins to build a picture of his former life. Russia in the early twentieth century, the turbulence of the revolution, the aftermath. But how can this be possible when the pills beside his bed are dated 1999?In the deft hands of Eugene Vodolazkin, author of the multi award-winning Laurus, The Aviator paints a vivid, panoramic picture of life in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, richly evoking the sights, sounds and political turmoil of those days. Reminiscent of the great works of Russian literature, and shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, it cements Vodolazkin's position as the rising star of Russia's literary scene.

Anton is an undercover operative from future Earth, who travels to an alien world whose culture has not progressed beyond the Middle Ages. Although in possession of far more advanced knowledge than the society around him, he is forbidden to interfere with the natural progress of history. His place is to observe rather than interfere - but can he remain aloof in the face of so much cruelty and injustice...?

Several years after emigrating from the USSR, the author discovers the battered suitcase he had brought with him gathering dust at the back of a wardrobe. As he opens the suitcase, the seemingly undistinguished items he finds inside take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them.

First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which - in concept and execution - affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author.

This evocative account of the life of the Renaissance's greatest figure traces Leonardo's early development as an artist and court figure to his final years in exile, portraying his loves and sufferings, as well as his intellectual curiosity and tireless loyalty to his ideals. But it is the background to his famous painting La Gioconda and his relationship with the mysterious Florentine woman who modelled for it that are at the heart of the novel - here presented in a new translation - and will make for an engrossing and unforgettable read.

The House of the Dead recounts the story of Alexander Goryanchikov, a gentleman who is sent to a prison colony in Siberia for killing his wife. Largely ignored at first by his fellow inmates due to his noble blood, he gradually settles in and becomes an avid observer of the new world around him watching his fellow prisoners being brutally and cruelly punished by the guards, listening to their past stories of blood and murder, assimilating the institution s social codes and learning that even convicts are capable of acts of pure generosity. Based on Dostoevsky's own autobiographical experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, this genre-defying novel is not only an unflinching expose of the conditions faced by prisoners during the Tsarist period, but also a call to see the human side in criminals and rediscover the values of forgiveness and compassion.

Written in 1932, but not published until 1962, over twenty years after its author’s death, The Life of Monsieur de Moliere charts the life of the French playwright, from his humble beginnings to later theatrical triumphs and political controversies. The work was met with disapproval by the Soviet authorities, who detected parallels between the lives of Moliere and Bulgakov, and viewed the work as a veiled critique of their own times. With a dazzling blend of biography and novelistic imagination, Bulgakov’s eccentric and satirical take on the life of a fellow writer energetically captures the genius of Moliere, while revealing another aspect of his own self.

The present volume of translations is based on the 2008 Vozvrash-chenie collection of short stories by Georgii Georgievich Demidov (1908-1987) titled Chudnaya planeta [A Wondrous Planet], from which Valentina Georgievna's reminiscence of her father and Marietta Chudakova's afterword also are drawn. With this translation Vozvrashchenie and its team of translators makes Georii Demidov's remarkable talent available to English-language readers. The five stories contained herein were selected from the nine published in the original Russian-language edition with an eye to the universality of the situations they present, which extends far beyond the limits of Stalin's GULag.

The most widely staged dramatist after Shakespeare, Chekhov left a deep mark both on the development of Russian literature and world theatre, with plays that were remarkable not just for their dialogue but their atmosphere and the tensions expressed between the lines. Collected in this volume are Chekhov s four most celebrated plays - The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard - in a brand-new translation by Hugh Aplin. In these personal stories of unfulfilled love, failed ambition and existential ennui, set against a background of unsettling social and economical change, the reader can appreciate the groundbreaking qualities of Chekhov s theatrical genius..