The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas's historical novels and one of the most popular adventure stories ever written. Now in a bracing new translation, this swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d'Artagnan, a brash young man from the countryside who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to become a musketeer and guard to King Louis XIII. Before long he...

Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
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The Steppe" the most lyrical of the five is an account of a nine-year-old boy s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. "The Duel "sets two decadent figures a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility on a collision course that ends in a series of...

Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man's essentially irrational nature.
Richard Pevear and Larissa...

Nikolai Gogol s "Dead Souls" is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literature a satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.
Gogol hoped to show the world the untold riches of the Russian soul in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensian swarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs, conniving petty officials all of them both utterly lifelike and alarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is the wily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in dead souls deceased serfs who still represent profit to those...

"The Double," written in Dostoevsky s youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, "Poor Folk. "The first real expression of his genius, "The Double" is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of...