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...

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...

'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...

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...

Composed around 730 B.C., Homer’s Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion. From the explosive confrontation between Achilles, the greatest warrior at Troy, and Agamemnon, the inept leader of the Greeks, through to its tragic conclusion, The Iliad explores the...

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so he may find new blood and spread undead curse, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Dracula has been...

After 18 years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are...

The story 'The Old Man and the Sea' is one of the most famous and beloved by the readers of Hemingway's works. It brought the author the Pulitzer Prize, and also played an important role in awarding him the title of Nobel laureate. This is a story about 'tragic stoicism' and courage, about how before in the face of ruthless fate and loneliness, a person, even losing, must maintain dignity....

The Good Soldier Schweik is the story beginning in Prague with news of the assassination in Sarajevo that precipitates World War I. Schweik displays such enthusiasm about faithfully serving the Austrian Emperor in battle that no one can decide whether he is merely an imbecile or is craftily undermining the war effort. However, he is arrested by a member of the secret police after making some...