This collection is a dazzling mix of absurdity, satire and humanity – from the surreal horror of “The Nose” to the bleak dignity of “The Overcoat” and the tragicomic “Diary of a Madman.” Alongside lesser‑known tales of provincial life, Gogol’s stories cut through bureaucracy, vanity and loneliness to expose the beauty and despair of human existe...

DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION. When the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga – Lensky’s fiancée – Onegi...

How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy’s desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha who, despite their differences, falls passionately in love with an older man, and marries him. Soon, however, the gap between them becomes unbridgeable. "I’m not the sort of husband you dream of when you’re walk...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these? Humbert Humbert's seducti...

Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass ...

Condemned to sleeplessness by the chatter permeating his guesthouse room, a forlorn traveller turns his ear to the riotous tale spun by the garrulous, meddlesome, inane and utterly unprincipled Márya Martýnovna next door. Her exuberant deformations of morality and language scandalised Tsarist society, and she remains one of Russian literature’s ...

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding ho...

The essential edition of the greatest stories by the Russian master of the form. Chekhov was without doubt one of the greatest observers of human nature in all its untidy complexity. His short stories, written throughout his life and newly translated for this essential collection, are exquisite masterpieces in miniature. Here are tales offering ...

A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife’s suicide; a witness to a young girl’s ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of the dead… the narrators of these four confessional tales show how little we understand ourselves. "I am a ridiculous man. They ca...

Leskov’s stories of Russian life are explosions of imagination. Peopled by outsized characters including serfs, princes, Gypsy girls, horse dealers, nomadic Tartars and garrulous storytellers, Leskov’s writing exuberantly fables the national character of his age. For the first time, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation brings Les...

Dostoyevsky set out to create a protagonist with 'a truly beautiful soul' and to trace the fate of such an individual as he comes into contact with the brutal reality of contemporary society. The novel begins when the innocent Prince Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg and finds himself drawn into a web of violent and passionate relationships that ...

In this new edition of “The Queen of Spades” by Pushkin, a young man becomes consumed by obsession when he hears a legend about an elderly countess who knows a secret to winning at cards. As greed, superstition, and fate collide, the tale spirals into madness, murder, and the supernatural – a chilling classic of avarice, ambition and doom. A you...

Avdotya Panaeva’s The Talnikov Family portrays a tumultuous upbringing in 1820s St Petersburg with equal parts wit and rage. In the Talnikov household, violence is in the air. Natasha grows up in a chaotic and abusive family, surrounded by screaming relatives and scurrying cockroaches. Her father whips his children but dotes on his pets.Her aunt...

Old Arkhip sits by a wizened willow, fishing and sharing whispered stories. One recalls a spring day decades ago when a strange encounter pulled him from rural peace into crime, corruption, and murder. Alongside thirty-two other tales spanning Chekhov’s career, The Willow showcases his mastery of the short story. Old Arkhip sits every day by th...

In “Woe from Wit” by Alexander Griboyedov, sharp‑tongued idealist Alexander Chatsky returns to Moscow after years abroad hoping to find love – only to find a society mired in hypocrisy, servility and empty ranks. His wit becomes his curse as he unmasks shallow ambition – and ends up branded mad, forced to flee a world that fears honest...