M. Zoshchenko is one of the largest Russian writers of the 20th century, whose work goes beyond the satirical genre. This book presents Zoshchenko the comedian, Zoshchenko the philosopher, Zoshchenko the continuer of the classical traditions of Russian prose. The Blue Book is ironic and, together with the lyrical look at the history of human relations. The text of The Blue Book is published...

White Nights is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, originally published in 1848, early in the writer's career. Like many of Dostoyevsky's stories, White Nights is told in first person by a nameless narrator; the narrator is living in Saint Petersburg and suffers from loneliness. He gets to know and falls in love with a young woman, but the love remains unrequited as the woman misses her lover...

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'.

In the book, Radishchev takes an imaginary journey between Russia's two principal cities; each stop along the way reveals particular problems for the traveller through the medium of story telling. The work, often described as a Russian Uncle Tom's Cabin, is a polemical study of the problems in the Russia of Catherine the Great: serfdom, the powers of the nobility, the issues in government and...

Madame Bovary - the most famous and most perfect novel by Gustave Flaubert. Having chosen a very unassuming plot for his book, the author created a work timeless. For the past century and a half, readers have not ceased to worry about the fate of a romantic-minded woman who, marrying an ordinary man, continues to look for all-consuming love, which leads her to cheating on her husband and her...

The great Goethe conceived his 'Faust' when he was a little over twenty years old, and completed the tragedy a few months before his death. This work was the result of the philosophical and artistic searches of the author - a poet, playwright, prose writer, the greatest scientist of his time, a man of encyclopedic knowledge. The hero of the tragedy, Dr. Johann Faust, lived in the first half of...

English humor for the Russian reader is inextricably linked with the name of the remarkable writer who conquered the whole world with his novels and stories, Jerome Klapki Jerome. The adventures of the unlucky, good-natured English traveling on the Thames, which Jerome wrote about in his famous novel Three in a Boat, Not Counting a Dog and its sequel Three on Four Wheels, have become well known...

'Rarely, to such an extent, in such complete equilibrium, were two hard-to-combine elements: sympathy for humanity and artistic feeling,' F.I. Tyutchev admired the Notes of the Hunter. In Notes of the Hunter, Turgenev recreates the thin, colorful material of national life: poetry and prose, light and shadows are intertwined here in unique, bizarre images, and nature turns out to be a necessary...

N.V. Gogol is the greatest Russian writer and playwright. One of the peaks of his work, the most famous of his works is considered to be the comedy 'The Examiner'. Since the first production in 1836, the play has not left the stage of theaters around the world and has served as the basis for numerous film adaptations, and the names of its characters have become common nouns. Gogol's plays...

Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin is a poet, prose writer, translator, journalist, publisher, the most prominent representative of sentimentalism in Russian literature, a reformer of the Russian language and a major historiographer. His work became a school for the next generation of Russian writers. It was he who found new words and techniques for revealing the inner world of man, the subtlest...