In Bulgakov’s ‘Diaboliad’, the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the Main Central Depot of Match Materials and t...więcej »
In the Twilight, the third collection of short stories compiled by Anton Chekhov himself, was his first major success and won him the prestigious Pushkin Prize when it was published in 1888. This v...więcej »
In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual plea...więcej »
The founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted – through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry – a lon...więcej »
A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official’s son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the...więcej »
Presented as a series of letters between the humble copying clerk Devushkin and a distant relative of his, the young Varenka, Poor People brings to the fore the underclass of St Petersburg, who liv...więcej »
The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of The Master and Margarita – now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature – was characterized by a constant and la...więcej »
In order to repay a small debt, the young student Mitya is persuaded by a friend to falsify a bank bond and cash it in. Little does he suspect that this small misdemeanour will have a profound impa...więcej »
Coming back to the “nest” of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his...więcej »
One of the many aspects of Alexander Pushkin’s immense contribution to Russian language and literature, and perhaps the one he is most popular for, is his mastery of the love poem, a genre wh...więcej »
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 at...więcej »
During a stifling St Petersburg summer, the rich landowner Velchaninov is haunted by the figure of a man he keeps glimpsing in the street. When he receives a surprise visit from him late at night, ...więcej »
The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs...więcej »
This trilogy of short novels, taken as a whole, recounts the young narrator’s early life up to his university days, each episode told through the perceptions, points of view and emotions felt...więcej »
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 successful ...więcej »
Begun in 1920 while Bulgakov was employed in a hospital in the remote Caucasian outpost of Vladikavkaz, and continued when he started working for a government literary department in Moscow, Notes o...więcej »
First published in 1831, Belkin’s Stories was the first completed work of fiction by the founding father of Russian literature. Through a series of interlinked stories purporting to have been...więcej »
Ivan Bunin’s first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in ...więcej »
In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sak...więcej »
The civil servant Ivan Matveich and his wife Yelena Ivanovna are spectators of an exhibition – in a shopping arcade – of a crocodile owned by a German, when Ivan is suddenly swallowed a...więcej »
