Delve into Russian Literature
Explore the depths of Russian literature with essential novels from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. From The Idiot and Crime and Punishment to War and Peace, delve into masterpieces of fiction and Soviet history.
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic tale of one man’s pure innocence in the face of a society obsessed with power, money, and manipulation The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hailed by Washington Post Book World as “the best [translation] currently available" when it was first published, this second edition of Crime and Punishment has been updated in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel. In Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is almost unequalled in world literature for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision. Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.
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War and Peace
by graf Leo Tolstoy
Presents the classical epic of the Napoleonic Wars and their effects on four Russian families
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Children of the Arbat
by Анатолий Рыбаков
Chilling portrait of Stalin & his terror and its impact on a generation of young friends living in Moscow's Arbat.
