The novel's heroes, Aristarchus and Nadezhda, were destined for each other and possessed a rare talent of love that not everyone has. Not everyone can withstand such love. Their lives were shaken, twisted and lifted to the crest of the ninth wave. Modern Orpheus and Eurydice had to enter into a duel with fate. They did not have the chance to live together, but death united them.

Here cattlemen steal geese, drink port on the roof of the Kazan Cathedral, Soviet citizens hunt for shortages and mock the leaders; here the romantic builders of the Great Empire love, believe and cheat, and the golden Brezhnev era becomes clearer in the haze like a beautiful and nostalgic picaresque novel.

'Legends of Arbat' is a collection of incredibly funny and dizzying stories from the Soviet and recent past. Ruthless truth and folk mythology form a brilliant alloy and explosive mixture.

‘The novel ‘The Kukotsky Case’ takes place in the forties and sixties: the end of the Stalinist era, the defeat of genetics, the death of a tyrant, the thaw, the first jazzmen. Against the backdrop of all these events is the life of Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky, a brilliant doctor endowed with the gift of ‘inner vision.’ Physicality and , it would seem, the crudest physiology (here the author...

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila...

Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to...

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and...

In this issue: Vassili Grossman The Commissar, Leonid Latynin Stavr and Sarah, Nina Sadur Irons and Diamonds, Ludmila Ulitskaia March 1953, Barely Soup, Igor Pomerantsev Sobs in Corners, A Little About You, Yosip, Victor Beilis Breakfast Alfresco. Stories united under subtitle What It Means To Be A Jew In Russia: Lev Anninsky The Wandering Jew, Osip Mandelstam Mikhoels, Larissa Miller Home...

of several generations of an upper-class family during the First World War and the Civil War in Russia. Historical events, providing a background for the narrative, are depicted not directly but rather as seismic shock waves overturning and transforming the lives of ordinary people. Lala, Natasha, Toma - three heroines are close friends, all from formerly affluent families stripped of their...

In this issue: Larissa Miller HomoLudens, Childhood in Post-War Moscow, Papa Misha, St.Petersburg-Leningrad, Muzyka - Music, Flitting and Gliding, the Black Sea, Virgin Lands, My Romance with English, My Land and Home, In Lieu of Conclusion. Larissa Miller's memoir recounts her childhood in postwar Moscow, with reminiscences of her mother, a major journalist under Stalin, and of her father...