*A Story of a Life: Books 1–3* introduces the reader to the most crucial stages of the author’s biography—childhood, youth, and early adulthood—set against the backdrop of the country’s rapidly changing history. – In *Distant Years*, Paustovsky portrays the world of his childhood: family, nature, early travels, and the impressions that shaped the future writer’s character. *Restless Youth*...

– *The Story of a Life* is not a dry memoir but a major literary work in which a real-life biography transforms into a genuine novel. – Through the author’s recollections, the reader journeys from his pre-revolutionary childhood and school years to his early literary successes. The protagonist describes wars, relocations between cities, newspaper work, and encounters with the people who shaped...

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...

Oliver is eleven years old, and he chose his own name after a favorite Dickens character. He loves playing Snake on his phone and eating food ‘like they do in America’; he dreams of defeating the bully Tsapa, being cured of HIV, and finding a real family. But just as his prospective mom and dad arrive from Salt Lake City, TV reports begin predicting the imminent end of the world. Fiction writer...

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...

Gilles de Rais—a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and a Marshal of France—was also a bloodthirsty serial killer. The Roman Emperor Tiberius—a contemporary of Jesus Christ—was one of history's most notorious libertines. What connection do they have to Epstein’s island? What is reincarnation, really? Are we responsible for actions committed in past lives? Was it truly *us*? Who was Jeffrey...

*Summa Technologiae* marked the culmination of the classical era of future studies. In this book, Stanislaw Lem conducted a unique and bold technological analysis of civilizations. He examined the potential emergence of fundamentally new groups of scientific disciplines and completely rejected simple extrapolative models of the future. Written over forty years ago, the book remains entirely...

A multitude of different personalities dwell within each of us, yet a rational mind suppresses any attempt they might make to assert their independence. Rosa, the protagonist of Tatyana Shcherbina’s novel, spent many years in a lethargic sleep; it is hardly surprising, then, that she slips back and forth between classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the final years of the USSR. Yet the...

The Insulted and Humiliated. In this novel we see a young man madly in love with a girl from a moderately poor family. This girl falls in love with a very aristocratic prince - a man without principles, but charming in his childish egotism - extremely attractive by his sincerity, and with a full capacity for quite unconsciously committing the worst crimes toward those with whom life brings...

Sergei Dovlatov is one of the most popular and widely-read Russian authors from the end of the twentieth century. His stories, anecdotes and notes have been translated into many languages, adapted to film, and studied in schools and universities. Dovlatov's surprisingly funny yet at times strikingly sad stories have long been considered classics. You will remember his quirky jokes instantly,...