This text represents an extraordinary example of late Russian literary development. It is populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of contemporary socialist and realist novels.

One of the most important works of twentieth-century Russian prose, "Kotik Letaev, " the great symbolist novel of childhood, depicts the emergence of consciousness and its development into self-consciousness in a Russian boy growing up among the Moscow intelligentsia in the 1800s.
Kotik's experience is based on elements from Bely's own early childhood, but on a larger level his experience represents the stages of human history, the history of philosophy, and childhood language development. The story, seen through the eyes of a child from the age of three to five years, is told in complex,...

The novel "A Brief Excursion "anchors this collection of fiction by one of the most significant postwar Croatian writers. This novel and six stories, including many from Soljan's first book, "Traitors, "reveal a sensibility both comic and poignant, devoted to questions of identity and solidarity, of how the one and the many conflict and intermingle-issues that were at the center of both political and literary life for Soljan. Whether fixing up a summerhouse on the Istrian coast or confronting prejudice and the past in a tourist town, Soljan's characters are stirred to action by an undefined...

Teresa, first published in 1886, is set in Italy's Po Valley near Cremona. The story relates the life of Teresa Caccia, an eldest daughter whose primary responsibilities at age fifteen include taking care of her younger siblings. When she falls in love, the union is deemed financially unsuitable and she's forced to spend the remainder of her youth caring for her family. Only when her brothers and sisters have left home can she emerge from her bleak existence and create her own life.

Through Teresa and other women characters, Neera addressed the injustice of such societal...

According to the myth of the Wandering Jew, Ahasverus denied Christ a resting place while Christ was traveling to Golgotha. In turn, Ahasverus was cursed to roam the earth until the Second Coming. Stefan Heym's novel re-creates and expands this myth to propose that the right synthesis of love and rebellion can bring humankind to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Heym introduces both Ahasverus and Lucifer as angels cast out of heaven for their opinions on God's order. Their respective oppositions continue throughout the rest of time: Ahasverus remains defiant through protest rooted in love and a...

A Dostoevskian psychological novel of ideas, " Novel with Cocaine" explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Revolution, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the...

Drawing on the tragic past of Russia and its empire to comment on the issues and ideas of his day, Leo Tolstoy wrote the stories in "Divine and Human and Other Stories "during the chaos surrounding the 1905 revolution. These stories, presented together for the first time, show the depth of, and contradictions in, Tolstoy's thought as he tried to reconcile his harsh religious beliefs with humanist appeals for justice. Taken as a whole, the collection is a revealing look at the complex life and thought of a literary giant.

Yury Trifonov took a turn toward the controversial, and a leap toward greatness, with the publication of the two novellas included in this collection. "The Exchange" and "The Long Goodbye" depict the complex dilemmas and compromises of Russian life after World War II. These works, along with the short stories "Games at Dusk" and "A Short Stay in the Torture Chamber," detail the moral and spiritual decline in Russia that resulted from the growing distance between the theoretical idealism of the Soviet state and the actual materialism and careerism that increasingly marked society.

Osip Mandelstam has come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. This volume includes his autobiographical sketches, The Noise of Time; his novella The Egyptian Stamp; Fourth Prose; and his travel memoirs. There are essays by Clarence Brown.

Initially rejected by the author's scandalized publisher, "Constance Ring" is now considered a classic of Scandinavian-and world-literature, a passionate condemnation of marriage and moral hypocrisy that has drawn comparisons to "Madame Bovary" and "The Awakening." The story of a naive young woman who sets out to divorce her loving but adulterous husband, "Constance Ring" is an intimate portrayal of a vibrant woman's refusal to yield to the forces that constrict women's lives in a society that offers them few choices.