The second volume covers perhaps the most glorious decade in Russian history—1815–1825. This is a decade of complete peace. For Russia, all wars are over. Europe recognizes the authority of the country that liberated it from Napoleon's rule. Emperor Alexander is called the ‘Agamemnon of Europe,’ compared to the leader of the Achaean kings in the legend of the Trojan War. Alexander establishes a...

The third volume is devoted to the first period of Nicholas Pavlovich's reign. The nature of ‘Knight Nicholas,’ as he was called in childhood, the ‘Don Quixote of autocracy,’ as he was later called, was infused with the absolute conservatism of his mentors, the historian Nikolai Karamzin and General Matthias Lambsdorff: the individual is insignificant, the state is valuable in itself. An...

‘The Biggest Ferris Wheel’ is a novel-autofiction in which real life, resembling fiction, blends with fantasy, resembling life. Simple and bright stories from life, brief love affairs that never developed into anything more, the painful experience of war, encounters with people identified by initials of varying degrees of obviousness—this motley narrative is brought together in touching...

‘Nine-Shoes’ is a collection of texts by Viktor Shenderovich, written in various (very different) years and serving as an artistic reflection on several eras in Russian life. For forty years—from the early Andropov era to the late Putin era—Shenderovich has been trying to answer the question of why the country never emerged from slavery and at what point we stopped hearing the warning signs....

Terrible times reveal the true value of poetry. Vera Polozkova's sixth book of poetry contains poems written from 2021 to 2024, during a bitter time of loss: of home, friends, peace, tranquility, and the person closest to her—her mother. But it is also a time of finding new meaning and a new life. Alongside the new poems are texts that became famous in years past, but read completely...

The book ‘Deal with the Devil: German-Russian Relations between the First and Second World Wars’ is a compact and extremely engaging presentation of the history of the Russian and German peoples, filled with events of historic proportions. With captivating dynamism and literary precision, Sebastian Hafner describes the twists and turns in relations between nations that sometimes fought each...

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is someone who knows how to work with chaos. She's known it since her hungry childhood during the war. Today, the girl who sang in the courtyards of Kuibyshev for bread is a celebrated writer, and people call her ‘great.’ But today, Petrushevskaya says, ‘There Is No Time.’ That's the title she gave to her book, which she's long wanted to compile from the texts of an...

Before emigrating, she participated in saving the Solzhenitsyn Archive after his arrest, miraculously escaping repression herself. In exile, she worked for the renowned Ardis publishing house and was a BBC journalist during its golden age. In perestroika-era Moscow, she witnessed and participated in the era of free speech... Masha Slonim's long-awaited memoir is a spy thriller, a dramatic...

Foreigners gathered under this cover. Some by passport, some by spirit, and some simply too flamboyant for this world. Meryl Streep and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alla Pugacheva and Jean Cocteau, Vera Polozkova and Greta Garbo. And also Audrey Hepburn, Margarita Terekhova, Andrey Danilko, Renata Litvinova... They have one thing in common: they are ‘different,’ they ‘didn't fit in’—and so they...

A poignant novel about a man living on the edge—between love and addiction, faith and self-destruction, madness and the search for meaning. – The hero goes through a journey from teenage mistakes to realizing his own diagnosis—borderline personality disorder, which becomes the key to understanding his entire life. – Pavel Selukov creates an honest and emotionally charged text about pain,...

A book about creativity, exploring the metaphor of the writer as thief, spy, and murderer. He ‘steals’ words, ‘peeps’ at life, and ‘kills beauty’ for the sake of art. - The book is set between the 1950s and 1980s in the towns of the Kaliningrad region, formerly Prussia. The history of this place directly influences the destinies of the characters.