This edition presents Leo Tolstoy’s so-called ‘Caucasian works’: the short stories ‘The Raid,’ ‘The Wood-Felling,’ and ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus,’ as well as the novellas *The Cossacks* and *Hadji Murat*. These works reflect the impressions the writer gathered during his three-year service in the Caucasus. In 1851, he traveled there to join his older brother Nikolai—an officer in the active...

This work by the 29-year-old author, thanks to the brilliant Alexandrian verse combined with a piercing love affair, was destined to become one of the most played plays in the world theater. The translation published in this edition by E. Baevskaya fully reflects all the dramatic features of the original.

This edition includes two of Shakespeare’s great tragedies—*Hamlet* and *Othello*—as well as *Romeo and Juliet*, the immortal tale of young, pure love. For centuries, people have sought the secret behind Shakespeare’s greatness and wondered why he eclipsed other brilliant figures of the Golden Age of English drama, forever etching his name into the history of world literature and theater.

Marina Tsvetaeva belonged to no poetic school and acknowledged no literary influences—only human ones. She stood alone, ‘for all’ and ‘against all.’ A staggering temperament combined with extraordinary rhythmic variety defines Tsvetaeva’s lyric poetry. Disregarding the boundaries of convention, she infused her poetry with an elemental force. And, despite misunderstanding, loneliness, and a...

‘Ivan the Terrible is waiting for the End of the World. In the pride of autocracy, he imagines himself as the savior of the people, the Christ of the Second Coming, and establishes the oprichnina - the order for the defense of the faith. If the people believe in the tsar as in God, the tsar will become a miracle worker. With a wave of his hand, he will plunge all enemies into dust and cover...

Kidnapped is a madcap crime spree that caroms from crisis to crisis, through lands real and imagined. It tells the tale of Sergei Sertsov, not one but two boys from Moscow with more than just a name in common, and the women who go to great lengths to protect them. The story unfurls in a whirlwind of deceit and double crossing—babies are switched at birth, documents forged, palms greased,...

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving through the forests of Northwest Russia to meet up with some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of local hitchhikers, who persuade him to come work with them at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, or NITWiT. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional Institute involve...

A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: ‘At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.’ But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Fréderique, the apparently perfect...

This absorbing, sensitive novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a summer resort outside of Salzburg that he visited as a child. But in the spa town where he once thrilled to the joys of youth, he now feels unproductive and uninspired, adrift in the modern world born after World War One. Over ten days in 1924 in a ramshackle inn that has...

Two elderly people, Artur and Isabella, meet and have a passionate sexual encounter on New Year’s Eve. Details of the lives of Artur, a retired Yugoslav army captain, and Isabella, a Holocaust survivor, are revealed through police dossiers. As they fight loneliness and aging, they take comfort in small things: for Artur, a collection of 274 hats; for Isabella, a family of garden gnomes who live...

The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after World War II. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn, the capital of that new postwar capitalist nation, West Germany. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle...

Fairy Tales gathers the unconventional verse dramolettes of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Narrated in Walser's inimitable, playful language, these theatrical pieces overturn traditional notions of the fairy tale, transforming the Brothers Grimm into metatheater, even metareflections. Snow White forgives the evil queen for trying to kill her, Cinderella doubts her prince and enjoys being hated...