Пророк Альмустафа, двенадцать лет прожив в чужом для него городе Орфалес, собирается вернуться домой. По дороге его останавливает группа местных жителей, их интересует мнение пророка о любви и смерти, свободе и власти, добре и зле. Лаконичные, но вместе с тем всеобъемлющие рассуждения Альмустафы представлены в виде притч. Они не только дают ответы на вопросы горожан, но и находят отклик в...

Очень необычный сборник. Очень непривычный Достоевский. Достоевский не только (и не столько) трагический, но — ироничный, веселый, трогательный и даже сентиментальный. Достоевский ‘малой формы’ — мастер злободневных сюжетов, комических ситуаций и остроумных диалогов. Достоевский в начале своего литературного пути – до ‘Великого пятикнижия’. ‘Село Степанчиково и его обитатели’, ‘Хозяйка’,...

Famous for his enormously influential poetry and plays, Alexander Pushkin is also beloved for his short stories. This collection showcases his tremendous range, which enabled him to portray the Russian people through romance, drama, and satire. The sparkling humor of the five ‘Tales of Belkin’ contrasts with Pushkin's dark fable of gambling and obsessive greed in ‘The Queen of Spades’ and his...

The Queen of Spades; The Tales of Belkin; Peter the Great's Blackamoor; The Captain's Daughter.

Ostap Bender, the ‘grand strategist,’ is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He's obsessed with getting one last big score?a few hundred thousand will do, and heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are ‘a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception.’ When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an...

The book ‘Masquerade’ is a collection of selected prose by Olga Petrivna Dragomanova-Kosach, an outstanding Ukrainian writer who most often appeared under the pseudonym Olena Pchilka. In the national cultural space, she did a lot not only as an author, but also as a public figure, ethnographer, translator, publisher and patron of the arts. Olena Pchilka's multifaceted creative nature is...

The book ‘Eight Days from the Life of Lulya’ is a collection of prose by Oleksandr Konysky, an outstanding Ukrainian writer, poet, public figure, and spiritual educator. The works carefully depict a social portrait of the diverse intelligentsia of the late 19th century, through which the author penetrates the essence of human nature. His prose is distinguished by subtle psychologism, poetic...

The book ‘On the Island’ is a collection of modernist prose by Mykhailo Mykhailovych Kotsiubynsky. The famous author of Ukrainian classical literature had a gift: he saw the most secret corners of the human soul. The writer could delve into the consciousness of an individual, revealing their true motives, fears, and emotions. This is what helped him create unique, rather contradictory...

Maik Iohansen is the most playful writer of Ukrainian literature. This book invites you into the world he created - cheerful, witty, incredibly imaginative and bright. This collection of ironic prose contains fifteen of his texts, in which he tried humor in different ways: in satire, feuilleton, humorous stories, short stories and even in a novel. The author will make you laugh, take you...

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The intricate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from...