A landmark novel that officially marks the very inception of the dystopian genre. Banned during the Soviet era, it is now considered a classic of not only Russian but also world literature of the 20th century. It is a novel about a ‘society of equals’ in which the human individual is reduced to a mere ‘number.’ Everything is standardized—clothing and apartments, thoughts and feelings. There are...

A circle of hedonists at the Baden-Baden resort is rife with intense passions and ceaseless, heated debates about the fate of the fatherland. Grigory Litvinov, a thirty-year-old landowner, views this farce with a mix of boredom and irony; however, a chance encounter with a past love—the beautiful, high-society socialite Irina Ratmirova—splits his life into ‘before’ and ‘after,’ transforming him...