The eight stories that make up Octaedro - a figure as geometric as it is mysterious, as perfect as it is reticent - mix certain social and political content that Cortázar had addressed in Libro de Manuel (1973) with his most recurrent themes: love, dreams, illness, death, the threshold between the everyday and the fantastic.

We were music in the ice…’ – this is how Pasternak described the fate of the generation that in the twenties had to ‘move from lyric poetry to epic poetry’. It was then that he created great works, thoroughly imbued with the revolutionary element: the poems ‘High Disease’, ‘The Year Nine Hundred and Fifth’, ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’. The time demanded an epic genre, and Pasternak accepted this...

The story is told by a narrator (a lightly fictionalized version of Pushkin's public image), whose tone is educated, worldly, and intimate. The narrator digresses at times, usually to expand on aspects of this social and intellectual world. This allows for a development of the characters and emphasises the drama of the plot despite its relative simplicity. The book is admired for the artfulness...

It is a pseudo-autobiographical postmodernist prose poem by Russian writer and satirist Venedikt Erofeev. Written between 1969 and 1970 this book was passed around in samizdat for a long time. The story follows an alcoholic intellectual, Venya (or Venichka), as he travels by a suburban train on a 125 km (78 mi) journey from Moscow to visit his beautiful beloved and child in Petushki, a city...

The last, most voluminous and one of the most famous novels by F. M. Dostoevsky addresses the reader to timeless moral and philosophical questions about sin, retribution, compassion and mercy.

'The Master and Margarita' by MA Bulgakov is the most amazing and mysterious work of the 20th century. Published in the mid-1960s, this novel amazed readers with its unusual design, brilliance and fantastic action, uniting characters from different eras and cultures. The author created a 'novel in a novel', where a religious and historical mystery dating back to the legend of the crucified...