A new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866). The impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to free himself from debt by killing an old moneylender, an act he sees as elevating himself above conventional morality. Like Napoleon he will assert his will and his crime will be justified by its elimination of vermin for the sake of the greater good. But Raskolnikov...

The Idiot (1868), written under the appalling personal circumstances Dostoevsky endured while travelling in Europe, not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most powerful indictment of a Russia struggling to emulate contemporary Europe while sinking under the weight of Western materialism. It is the portrait of...

'The History of a City' is a caustic work full of irony, in which, under the guise of a 'chronicle' of the fictional city of Glupov, the author mercilessly denounces the typical vices of Russian society - stupidity, tyranny and bribery of those in power, embezzlement and cringing of officials, laziness, ignorance and obscurantism. Unfortunately, we have to admit that Saltykov-Shchedrin's...

The famous master of book graphics Kostyantyn Sulima - the author of the first Ukrainian comic 'Buiviter' - created a simple model comic based on the classic novel by Mykola Gogol. It seems that these drawings have existed forever, and the text of 'Taras Bulba' in the brilliant translation of Mykola Sadovskyi is conveyed with such tact and reliability, which, it seemed, no longer had to be...

Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Doblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time.

The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned...

Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography - long unavailable in English - appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a...

Siddhartha is a novel by Hermann Hesse that deals with the spiritual journey of a boy known as Siddhartha from the Indian subcontinent during the time of Lord Buddha. In a very simple prose, Hesse has conveyed a very profound message for all seekers. A brahmin boy follows his heart and goes through various lives to finally understand what it means to be enlightened. He experiences life as a...

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...

The Tale of Khoja Nasreddin is a wonderful book that takes pride of place in the treasury of Russian literature, based on the folklore of Central Asia. The adventures of a cheerful, cunning tramp, the hero of many anecdotes, parables, fairy tales, have long gained worldwide fame. Driven by hatred for the greedy rich, fed at the expense of the common people, he uses all sorts of tricks to...