Recommendations based on "Notes from Underground"

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Impressive . . . Rutherford has indeed embraced all of Russia.”—The Washington Post Book WorldHere, Edward Rutherfurd turns his remarkable talents to a vast canvas: Russia. Spanning 1,800 years of its history, people, politics, and culture, Rutherford's grand saa is as multifaceted as Russia itself: harsh yet exotic, proud yet fearful of enemeies, steeped in ancient superstitions but always seeking to make its mark on the emerging world. In Russka, Rutherford transforms the epic of a great civilization into a human story of flesh and blood, boldness and action, chronicling the lives of four families who are divided by ethnicity but united in shapin the destiny of their land.“Rutherford's Russka succeeds. . . . [He] can take his place among an elite cadre of chroniclers such as Harold Lamb, Maurice Hindus and Henri Troyat.”—San Francisco Chronicle

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic fantasies disguises profound loneliness and estrangement from "living life." A Gentle Creature and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man show how withdrawal from reality can end in spiritual desolation as well as moral indifference, and how, in Dostoevsky's view, the tragedy of the alienated individual can only be resolved by the rediscovery of a sense of compassion and responsibility toward other people.No other edition brings together these specific stories--which are most interesting when read alongside one another--and the new translations capture all the power and lyricism of Dostoevsky's writing at tis best.

'although He Feared Death, He Could Not Stop. 'if I Stopped Now, After Coming All This Way - Well, They'd Call Me An Idiot!' A Pair Of Short Stories About Greed, Charity, Life And Death From One Of Russia's Most Influential Writers And Thinkers. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 Books For Penguin's 80th Birthday. Little Black Classics Celebrate The Huge Range And Diversity Of Penguin Classics, With Books From Around The World And Across Many Centuries. They Take Us From A Balloon Ride Over Victorian London To A Garden Of Blossom In Japan, From Tierra Del Fuego To 16th-century California And The Russian Steppe. Here Are Stories Lyrical And Savage; Poems Epic And Intimate; Essays Satirical And Inspirational; And Ideas That Have Shaped The Lives Of Millions. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Tolstoy's Works Available In Penguin Classics Are Anna Karenina, War And Peace, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,the Cossacks And Other Stories, The Kreutzer Sonata And Other Stories, What Is Art?, Resurrection, The Death Of Ivan Ilyich And Other Stories, Master And Man And Other Stories, How Much Land Does A Man Need? & Other Stories, A Confession And Other Religious Writings And Last Steps: The Late Writings Of Leo Tolstoy.

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.

This volume brings together Gogol's Petersburg Tales with his two most famous plays, all of which guide us through the streets of St. Petersburg, the city erected by force and ingenuity on the marshes of the Neva estuary. Something of the deception and violence of the city's creation seems to lurk beneath its harmonious facade, however, and it confounds its inhabitants with false dreams and absurd visions. This new translation by Christopher English brings out the unique vitality and humor of Russia's finest comic writer.

Pushkin’s prose tales are the foundation stones on which the great novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were built, but they are also brilliant and fascinating in their own right. In both prose and verse, Pushkin was one of the world’s great storytellers: direct and dramatic, clear-sighted, vivid, and passionate.This new and expanded Everyman’s edition of his stories includes all the mature work. In addition to such novella-length masterpieces as The Captain’s Daughter and The Tales of Belkin the collection now contains many more short pieces and the masterly History of Pugachev, a powerful account of the man who rebelled against Catherine the Great. This version is translated by Paul Debreczeny and Walter Arndt.

An anthology of Russian short fiction includes stories by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn

Six masterfully executed selections from the famed Russian author's most prolific period display those qualities for which he is famous - a natural aptitude for detail, dialogue, humor, and compassion. Includes 'The Darling', a poignant piece supporting the claim that life has no meaning without love; as well as 'The Kiss', 'Anna on the Neck', 'The Man in a Case', 'The Malefactor', and the title story.

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm BradburyAlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' and his gradual withdrawal from society. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness.Translated by Ronald Wilks with an Introduction by Robert Louis Jackson

The last Tsaritsa of Russia, Alexandra Fyodorovna, was murdered with her family on the night of 16-17 July 1918 by agents acting on behalf of the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The dramatic story of the demise of the Romanov dynasty has been recounted many times and has captivated the imagination of generations of readers throughout the world. The recently declassified 1918 diary of Alexandra - published here for the first time in its entirety - provides something no other account could do: a glimpse of the Tsaritsa's thoughts and activities from 1 January 1918 until the night of her death. As the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra wrote in English, though her native language was German and she became fluent in Russian after her marriage to Nicholas. The 1918 diary takes us into her private world, revealing the care she lavished on her children during this period of revolutionary turmoil, how she felt toward her husband, Tsar Nicholas, and what she imagined about the profound struggle - between past and present, old and new worlds, the sacred and the profane - then occurring over the destiny of Russia. The diary reveals that even in her most intimate reflections, she remained the representative of a great system of belief that had prevailed for hundreds of years in Russia and that she and Nicholas hoped to perpetuate. We see in painful detail the tragic daily confrontation between this system of belief and the reality of the modern world that had, in every sense, broken free of her and Nicholas's control.