The novel "Woe From Wit" by the writer and satirist, Griboyedov, is part of the Bristol Classical Press Russian texts series. The series is designed to meet the needs of the fast-growing A Level and undergraduate market for texts in the Russian language. Each text comes with English notes and vocabulary, and with an introduction by an editor with an expert knowledge both of the work and of its literary and cultural context.

Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958) was born in St. Petersburg and served in the Russian Army in the First World War. Invalided out, he traveled throughout Russia after the Revolution and saw a spell of service in the Red Army. He came back to St. Petersburg in 1921 and started to publish humorous satirical stories, which achieved considerable popularity. After the Second World War he was attacked by the Stalinist state and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. This marked the end of his literary career. This selection of short stories is confined to the 1920s, when Zoshchenko's talent...

This indispensable text can justly be regarded as the forerunner to the great flowering of Dostoevsky's novels which was to follow. This book contains the Russian text of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, with an English language introduction and notes.

Zamyatin's We is one of the best known Russian novels of the twentieth century. It is, at the same time, an anti-Utopia, a work of futuristic science fiction and a dire warning of the dangers of the regimented, totalitarian state. Completed in 1920, it was not published in Russia until 1988, for reasons of political censorship. Xamyatin's novel anticipates Huxley's Brave New World and was an acknowledged influence on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It also represents the highest achievement of Zamyatin's expericmental methods of 'neo-realism'.

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public. As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands. To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the highest and the lowest, the novel as well as the base. He make himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature. We may...