A desperate young man plans the perfect crime - the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law - if it will ultim... View details
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the stairs. His closet of a room was under the roof of a high, five-floor house and was more like a cupboard than a place in which to live. The land...
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read
Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. To... View details
Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, that if you do not tell me we are at war, if you again allow yourself to palliate all the in...
The sweeping love story of two people who defy the conventions of their age to follow the dictates of their hearts. Trapped in a stifling marriage, Anna Karenina is swept off her feet by the dashing Count Vronsky. When the truth about their passionat... View details
The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living ...
A classic by a Russian master
Prince Myshkin, the idiot, is an almost comically innocent Christ figure in a land of sinners, one whose faith in beauty contrasts sharply with that of his society's.... View details
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty t...
A collection of powerful stories by one of the masters of Russian literature, illustrating Fyodor Dostoyevsky's thoughts on political philosophy, religion and above all, humanity.
From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is ... View details
I am a sick person . . . A spiteful one. An unattractive person, too. I think my liver is diseased. But I don’t give a damn about my disease and in fact I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I do no...
Suppressed in the Soviet Union for twenty-six years, Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece is an ironic parable of power and its corruption, good and evil, and human frailty and the strength of love. Featuring Satan, accompanied by a retinue that includes t... View details
At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared in the Patriarchs’ Ponds Park. One, about forty, in a gray summer suit, was short, plump, dark-haired and partly bald. He carried his ...
A superb new translation of Dostoyevsky's chilling and prophetic novel of revolutionary fanaticism
Pyotr and Stavrogin are the leaders of a Russian revolutionary cell. Their aim is to overthrow the Tsar, destroy society, and seize power for themselve... View details
"flaccid woman" had prepared them in advance and had relished their effect beforehand. But Varvara Petrovna was not one to be taken aback by sentimental effects and riddles. She sternly demanded the m...
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America's most enduring authors
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set ... View details
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked an...
Les Misérables is a magnificent, sweeping story of revolution, love and the will to survive set amidst the poverty stricken streets of nineteeth-century Paris.
Escaped convict Jean Valjean turns his back on his criminal past to build his fortunes as ... View details
If only for the sake of being accurate in every particular, although this circumstance in no way impinges on the basic substance of what we are about to relate, it may be worth mentioning here the rum...
Considered to be one of the most crucial passages and subplots to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov", this story is a parable told by Ivan to his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk, about the return of Christ during the time of t... View details
‘You see, even here we can’t get by without a preface – a literary preface, that is, confound it!’ Ivan said, laughing. ‘And what kind of an author am I? Look, the action of my poem takes place in the...