Taras Bulba is a magnificent story portraying the life of the Ukrainian Cossacks who lived by the Dnieper River in the sixteenth century. Taras Bulba is an old and hardened warrior who feels a little rusty from lack of action. When his two sons return from school at Kiev, he eagerly takes them to the ‘setch,’ the camping and training island of the Cossacks. There they spend their time drinking and remembering old glories. It happens, however, that the Cossacks are going through an uneasy truce with their Turkish hegemones and the Tartar horsemen. Taras Bulba, always the warmonger, harangues the Cossacks, engineers a change in leadership, and leads them to attack the Catholic Poles. The Cossacks ride West, destroying everything they meet with extraordinary brutality. Finally, they lay siege to a walled city, but Andrew, Taras’s younger son, discovers that the woman he loves is inside. A masterful and brutal story of the horrors of war.

An enthralling novelette by Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers explores how a thirteen-year-old girl ceases to be a child and becomes a woman in Russia just before the Communist Revolution. The story examines the world through the reminiscences of a young girl and explores such themes as nature and how we are able to shape the world around us by how we perceive it. The novelette gives readers a prime example of Pasternak’s signature style and use of poetics, imagery, and lyricism in prose.

Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers is one of Pasternak’s first stories, and it originally appeared in a collection by the same name published in 1925.

Boris (Leonidovich) Pasternak was a Russian philosopher, poet, writer, and translator. He is famous worldwide for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. Born in Moscow in 1890 to a painter father and concert-pianist mother, Pasternak first pursued a formal education in musical composition at the University of Moscow, studying under the composer Scriabin. After six years, he gave up music and, following a brief stint in Germany studying philosophy, he returned to Russia to devote his life to writing. With the release of two major works of poetry—My Sister Life (1922) and Themes and Variations (1923), Pasternak found himself among the leading poets in Russia.

He went on to publish works of fiction, including Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers (1924), several short story collections, and an acclaimed autobiography. As his writing grew more political in the ’30s and ’40s, Pasternak was unable to publish his own poetry, and instead turned to translating great literary works, including his mentor Rainer Marie Rilke, into Russian.

In 1957, only three years before his death, he published Doctor Zhivago to instant international acclaim and a Nobel Prize nomination. In Russia, however, the book’s politics were not well received. It was banned and Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. This tumultuous political spotlight forced him to decline the award. Since his death in 1960, however, Pasternak’s works have grown in popularity and he remains one of the most influential Russian writers of the twentieth century.

Dostoyevsky’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues–brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality–that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.

В книгу вошли знаменитые и полюбившиеся читателю пьесы А. П. Чехова «Вишневый сад», «Чайка» и «Дядя Ваня» в переводе на английский язык.

Предлагаем вниманию читателей сборник рассказов великого русского писателя А. П. Чехова (1860–1904). Перевод Констанс Гарнетт дополнен комментарием.

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

The House of the Dead is a fictionalized memoir of a man serving a ten-year prison sentence for murdering his wife. Dostoyevsky drew heavily from his own four-year prison internment in a Siberian prison to draw attention to the dehumanizing, deadening effects of the modern prison system and invoke his philosophies of better ways of treating and rehabilitating prisoners.

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 the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this positively beautiful man on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.

Предлагаем вниманию англоязычного читателя один из самых известных романов великого русского писателя Ф. М. Достоевского (1821–1881) «Идиот» в переводе Евы Мартин.

Explore the Russian creative movement known as literary realism through the work of writer Nikolai Vassilievitch Gogol, whom many critics regard not only as one of the foremost practitioners of this style, but also as one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. This exquisitely translated collection brings together several of the short pieces widely categorized as Gogol’s finest work.

Translated from the Russian by MICHAEL GLENNY

with an epilogue by Viktor Nekrasov

Copyright © 1971 by McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 70-140252 08844

Printed in Great Britain

Предлагаем вниманию англоязычных читателей повесть великого русского писателя Федора Михайловича Достоевского (1821–1881) «Белые ночи». Перевод на английский язык Констанс Гарнетт дополнен комментарием.