The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader magnificently represents the great voices of this era. It includes such masterworks of world literature as Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman"; Gogol's "The Overcoat"; Turgenev's novel First Love; Chekhov's Uncle Vanya; Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych; and "The Grand Inquisitor" episode from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; plus poetry, plays, short stories, novel excerpts, and essays by such writers as Griboyedov, Pavlova, Herzen, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Maksim Gorky. Distinguished scholar George Gibian provides an...

A few factual points ought to be explained to the reader, even though the novel itself eventually suffices to clarify some of them. First, the title of the book. Among Russian serf-owning gentry, the idiomatic way to assess someone's wealth was to express it in terms of the number of "souls" he owned--that is, male, adult serfs. Taxes on serfs had to be paid by the owner until the next census or registration date even if they may have died in the meantime. Gogol's "dead souls," in addition to this literal reference to serfs who had died since the last registration date for serfs, are also a...

This Second Norton Critical Edition of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel is again based on the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation (originally published in 1918; revised with notes in 1939), which has never been surpassed. This volume reprints the 1939 edition, which the editor has revised, making twenty-one textual changes and revising or adding forty-nine footnotes.

These bizarre and wildly imaginative pieces, written in Soviet Russia forty years ago, are as vital and disturbing as the best of today's absurdist literature. Almost none of the works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky have been published before in any language.