A collection of stories that stand out for their special feminine irony, psychologism, and lack of taboos. This is prose about finding oneself, about the life of a ‘little person’ in the big world, written in incredibly lively and sharp language.

Foreigners gathered under this cover. Some by passport, some by spirit, and some simply too flamboyant for this world. Meryl Streep and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alla Pugacheva and Jean Cocteau, Vera Polozkova and Greta Garbo. And also Audrey Hepburn, Margarita Terekhova, Andrey Danilko, Renata Litvinova... They have one thing in common: they are ‘different,’ they ‘didn't fit in’—and so they created...

Before emigrating, she participated in saving the Solzhenitsyn Archive after his arrest, miraculously escaping repression herself. In exile, she worked for the renowned Ardis publishing house and was a BBC journalist during its golden age. In perestroika-era Moscow, she witnessed and participated in the era of free speech... Masha Slonim's long-awaited memoir is a spy thriller, a dramatic...

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is someone who knows how to work with chaos. She's known it since her hungry childhood during the war. Today, the girl who sang in the courtyards of Kuibyshev for bread is a celebrated writer, and people call her ‘great.’ But today, Petrushevskaya says, ‘There Is No Time.’ That's the title she gave to her book, which she's long wanted to compile from the texts of an...

Kirill Kobrin is a writer, historian, journalist, or, as he puts it, ‘a European writer and historian writing in Russian.’ His heroes include Wenceslas Hollar, Franz Kafka, Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Mann, Edward Gibbon, the author himself, and all of us who unfortunately found ourselves in this time and place.

The book ‘Deal with the Devil: German-Russian Relations between the First and Second World Wars’ is a compact and extremely engaging presentation of the history of the Russian and German peoples, filled with events of historic proportions. With captivating dynamism and literary precision, Sebastian Hafner describes the twists and turns in relations between nations that sometimes fought each...

‘Nine-Shoes’ is a collection of texts by Viktor Shenderovich, written in various (very different) years and serving as an artistic reflection on several eras in Russian life. For forty years—from the early Andropov era to the late Putin era—Shenderovich has been trying to answer the question of why the country never emerged from slavery and at what point we stopped hearing the warning signs. ‘I...

‘The Biggest Ferris Wheel’ is a novel-autofiction in which real life, resembling fiction, blends with fantasy, resembling life. Simple and bright stories from life, brief love affairs that never developed into anything more, the painful experience of war, encounters with people identified by initials of varying degrees of obviousness—this motley narrative is brought together in touching...

The third volume is devoted to the first period of Nicholas Pavlovich's reign. The nature of ‘Knight Nicholas,’ as he was called in childhood, the ‘Don Quixote of autocracy,’ as he was later called, was infused with the absolute conservatism of his mentors, the historian Nikolai Karamzin and General Matthias Lambsdorff: the individual is insignificant, the state is valuable in itself. An inept...

The second volume covers perhaps the most glorious decade in Russian history—1815–1825. This is a decade of complete peace. For Russia, all wars are over. Europe recognizes the authority of the country that liberated it from Napoleon's rule. Emperor Alexander is called the ‘Agamemnon of Europe,’ compared to the leader of the Achaean kings in the legend of the Trojan War. Alexander establishes a...