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...

An alarm sounds among the Wild Chicks: a fox is at the doorstep! But this is no ordinary predator; it signals real trouble. Their beloved hens—symbols of their gang and their friendship—are in danger. To help the birds, the girls must devise a complex plan. However, the task won't be easy, and they will have to turn to the Pygmies for help. The rescue mission turns into a spy adventure—complete...

*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...

Alexey Ivanov chronicles Akinfiy Demidov’s battle against this fire demon. Ivanov’s dark Gothic narrative mirrors the course of history. Although 18th-century Russia was an agrarian nation, a new industrial mentality was already taking shape at the Demidov plants. By the 19th century, this mindset had come to dominate the entire industrial Urals, and in the 20th century, it spread across the...

Did Kings Saul, David, and Solomon actually exist? Who authored the Pentateuch, and which events described in the Old Testament truly took place? In exploring the most complex enigmas of biblical studies, Russian scholar Andrey Desnitsky asks: is it valid to treat Holy Scripture as a historical source? Can we reconstruct the biblical past using the scientific method, and to what extent are such...

It is not only financial capital that is facing difficulties today. These challenges hinder the development of the information society and manifest as a decline in the intellect’s orientation toward the future. In his new book, the renowned scholar—philologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist—Igor Pavlovich Smirnov examines the turmoil shaking the global economy in the 21st century as an...

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...