The Petersburg Stories constitute Gogol's finest work, on which his fame is justly based. The plays included in this volume are 'The Government Inspector' and 'The Marriage'.

Hal Bregg is an astronaut who returns from a space mission in which only 10 biological years have passed for him, while 127 years have elapsed on Earth. He finds that the Earth has changed beyond recognition, filled with human beings who have been medically neutralized. How does an astronaut join a civilization that shuns risk?

This raid is full of dangers: the Khius planetship has never been tested in such severe atmospheric conditions before, the anomalous geological deposit Golconda Uranium is inaccessible to transport, and the mystery of the death of previous expeditions cannot but disturb brave explorers.

Other Shores is an autobiographical memoir by Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American classic writer, author of the novels The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Gift, and the controversial Lolita. The book was originally published in 1951 under the title Conclusive Evidence, three years later an expanded version translated into Russian by Nabokov himself was published under the title Other...

Vladimir Nabokov began working on his first novel, tentatively titled Happiness, in 1924 in Berlin. By the end of the year, the first two chapters of the book were ready, but the writer soon decided to destroy the manuscript. Only a small excerpt survived, which Nabokov reworked into a short story and published in January 1925 under the title Letter to Russia. He decided to return to the...

This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US. Now dying, he reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist, and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre illness, 'numerical nimbus syndrome'.

As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own...