Russian Stories

Two centuries of short stories by twenty-five titans of Russian literature, from Pushkin and Gogol to Tatyana Tolstaya and Svetlana Alexievich--in the beautifully jacketed Pocket Classics series.

Russian Stories rounds up marvelous short stories by all the Russian heavyweights, including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, and continuing up to contemporary writers such as Tatyana Tolstaya and the recent Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich. There is no similar one-volume collection of the best of the Russian greats in English, and especially none that include as many women as this one does, including a story by the recently rediscovered Teffi, who was widely hailed a century ago in Russia as "the female Chekhov." From the fate-changing storms that sweep through Alexander Pushkin's "The Blizzard" and Leo Tolstoy's "The Snow Storm" to the political whirlwind of perestroika that shapes Vladimir Sorokin's 1985 story "Start of the Season" to the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union as experienced by ordinary people in Alexievich's "Landscape of Loneliness," these riveting stories chronicle not only the particular dramas and upheavals of the Russian people, but also the tribulations and triumphs of the human spirit.

CHRISTOPH KELLER is editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Hip Hops: Poems About Beer. He is the author of prizewinning novels, plays, and essays in German, as well as the Swiss best-selling memoir The Best Dancer. He is the coauthor of a forthcoming biography of the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. He divides his time between New York City and St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Alexander Pushkin, "The Blizzard"
Mikhail Lermontov, "The Fatalist"
Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"
Leo Tolstoy, "The Snow Storm" 
Ivan Turgenev, "Living Relic"
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
Anastasiya Mirovich, "Elsa"
Anton Chekhov, "The Bishop"
Ivan Bunin, "The Gentleman from San Francisco"
Teffi, "The Quiet Backwater"
Mikhail Bulgakov, "The Adventures of Chichikov"
Osip Mandelstam, "Music in Pavlosk"
Isaac Babel, "Dolgushov’s Death"
Marina Tsvetaeva, "Life Insurance" 
Nina Berberova, "The Big City"
Vladimir Nabokov, "The Sisters Vane"
Andrei Bitov, "Geghard"
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, "Immortal Love"
Vladimir Sorokin, "The Start of the Season" 
Nina Sadur, "Wicked Girls"
Marina Palei, "Rendez-vous" 
Nina Gabrielyan, "Happiness"
Ludmila Ulitskaya, "Angel"
Tatyana Tolstaya, "Sweet Shura"
Svetlana Alexievich, from Landscape of Loneliness