This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the...

In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on untapped sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more...

After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and ‘be among people.’ Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with...

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime—the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law—if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, a fascinating...

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a ‘novel-pamphlet’ in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history's greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale-and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs-Hitler literally bought his people's consent.

Why did the Holocaust happen in Germany, of all places? How did a country known for its culture and refinement turn so rabidly anti-Semitic? Why did a nation where Jews had full civil rights and many opportunities-a place that Jews had eagerly flocked to in the early twentieth century to escape racist persecution in Poland and Russia-turn upon them so violently just a few decades later?...

How would you communicate the realities of living in a warzone to someone who has never had this experience? Thirty Ukrainian women, ages 10 to 72, answered this question in letters that emanate power, depth, pain, strength, and resilience. These fragments of life reveal the horrors of conflict but also the humanity of survivors.

To many, German food is humble comfort food, the kind of food that may not win a beauty award, but more than makes up for it with its power to soothe, nourish and cheer. In Classic German Cooking, Luisa Weiss—who was born in Berlin to an Italian mother and American father, and married into a family with roots in Saxony—has collected and mastered the essential everyday recipes of Germany and...

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish...

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique...

Memory Burn, is a coming-of-age story of a queer boy from a Czech industrial town. Torcík’ delves into the recesses of memory in an effort to come to terms with painful memories from his childhood. As a homosexual boy with a slight build growing up in a small industrial town, the protagonist of the story faces severe bullying at school, but his problems aren’t over once he gets home: his...