Recommendations based on "The Mikhail Bulgakov Collection"

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

One hot spring the devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught.(back cover)

The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, Devils (1871-2), also known as The Possessed, is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray that follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. This new translation includes the chapter "Stavrogin's confession," initially censored by Dostoevsky's publisher.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Of all Russian writers, Chekhov is one of the best liked and most easily appreciated. Yet he is also one of the most elusive. Here Donald Rayfield reveals the layers of meaning on which the great dramatist's stories and plays are built. He examines his brief twenty-year creative life, from medical student supplementing his income by writing comic stories to his rapid rise as the father of twentieth-century drama and narrative prose. Understanding Chekhov is enriched by revelations from previously unexplored archival material, which deepen our understanding of Chekhov's sources, preoccupations, philosophy, and his relations with theater, with fellow writers, and with contemporary ideas.

Acclaimed By Many As The World's Greatest Novel, This Is The Story Of A Wife, Anna Karenina, Who Abandons Her Empty Existence As The Wife Of A Petersburg Government Minister For A Passionate Relationship With A Young Officer, Count Vronsky.

The first state in history to be based explicitly on atheism, the Soviet Union endowed itself with the attributes of God. In this book, David Satter shows through individual stories what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea, how people were forced to act out this fictitious reality, and the tragic human cost of the Soviet attempt to remake reality by force.“I had almost given up hope that any American could depict the true face of Russia and Soviet rule. In David Satter’s Age of Delirium, the world has received a chronicle of the calvary of the Russian people under communism that will last for generations.”―Vladimir Voinovich, author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin“Spellbinding. . . . Gives one a visceral feel for what it was like to be trapped by the communist system.”―Jack Matlock, Washington Post“Satter deserves our gratitude. . . . He is an astute observer of people, with an eye for essential detail and for human behavior in a universe wholly different from his own experience in America.”―Walter Laqueur, Wall Street Journal“Every page of this splendid and eloquent and impassioned book reflects an extraordinarily acute understanding of the Soviet system.”―Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Times

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky's closest friend and the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters and with the sensations of a curious and often frightened little boy.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Hailed universally as Russia's finest comic writer, and by many as its greatest writer of prose, Nikolai creates a unique Ukranian world, from the darkest Gothic to folkloric levity. Here, this extraordinary countryside is revealed in all its variety in his first two collections of short stories. The only translation available of this cycle of stories, this edition captures fully the spirit and vigor of his important early work for the first time.

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons--the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha--are all involved at some level. Brilliantly bound up with this psychological drama is Dostoevsky's intense and disturbing exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, freedom of will, the collective nature of guilt, and the disastrous consequences of rationalism. Filled with eloquent voices, this new translation fully realizes the power and dramatic virtuosity of Dostoevsky's most brilliant work.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s harrowing, semi-autobiographical novel about the internal transformation of a man serving ten years in a remote Siberian prison“In order to understand the significance of the style and structure of the book, it is necessary to bear in mind that it was the result of a terrible mental, spiritual, and physical ordeal. . . . The point about the novel, however, is that it charts the reawakening of a man without a personality.”—from the Introduction Here was the house of the living dead, and a life like none other upon earth. In January 1850, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. The four years he spent there, startlingly re-created in The House of the Dead, were the most agonizing of his life. In this fictionalized account he recounts his soul-destroying incarceration through the cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange ‘family’ of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts. Yet The House of the Dead is far more than a work of documentary realism: it is also a powerful novel of redemption, describing one man’s spiritual and moral death and the miracle of his gradual reawakening.This Penguin Classics edition includes notes and an introduction by David McDuff discussing the circumstances of Dostoyevsky’s imprisonment, the origins of the novel in his prison writings, and the character of Aleksandr Petrovich.