Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - Russia - 20th Century

In the waning years of the Empire, a poet traverses Russia, from the Baltics to the capital, to the shores of the Black Sea. Along the way, he discusses man's place in the scheme of things with, among others, a very sober scientist and a very drunken landscape painter. He is harassed by the authorities, spends time on a movie set, and is an eyewitness to the August 1991 coup. Full of talk, philosophical speculation and dark humor, this sweeping, intricately structured novel challenges the form even as it presents a highly original view of the world and the former Soviet Union.

For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobelist's most accessible novel

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the...

The Russian Nobelist's semiautobiographical novel set in a Soviet cancer ward shortly after Stalin's death

One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state.

Cancer Ward, which has been compared to the masterpiece of another Nobel Prize winner, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial...

"The beginning of this tale of bygone days in Odessa dates to the dawn of the twentieth century. At that time we used to refer to the first years of this period as the 'springtime, ' meaning a social and political awakening. For my generation, these years also coincided with our own personal springtime, in the sense that we were all in our youthful twenties. And both of these springtimes, as well as the image of our carefree Black Sea capital with acacias growing along its steep banks, are interwoven in my memory with the story of one family in which there were five children: Marusya,...

In time for the centenary of the beginning of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobelist's major work

The month of November 1916 in Russia was outwardly quiet--the proverbial calm before the storm--but beneath the placid surface, society seethed fiercely.
In Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then known, luxury-store windows are still brightly lit; the Duma debates the monarchy, the course of war, and clashing paths to reform; the workers in the miserable munitions factories veer toward sedition.
At the front, all is stalemate, while in the countryside...

"A welcome volume of stories from Russia's finest contemporary fiction writer, Mikhail Shishkin, full of his typical fusing of mysticism and modernist experimentation." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards.

Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex,...