Two centuries of short stories by twenty-five titans of Russian
literature, from Pushkin and Gogol to Tatyana Tolstaya and Svetlana
Alexievich--in the beautifully jacketed Pocket Classics series.
Russian Stories rounds up marvelous short stories by all the Russian
heavyweights, including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev,
Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, and continuing up to contemporary
writers such as Tatyana Tolstaya and the recent Nobel Prize-winner
Svetlana Alexievich. There is no similar one-volume collection of the
best of the Russian greats in English, and especially none that include
as many women as this one does, including a story by the recently
rediscovered Teffi, who was widely hailed a century ago in Russia as the
female Chekhov. From the fate-changing storms that sweep through
Alexander Pushkin's The Blizzard and Leo Tolstoy's The Snow Storm to the
political whirlwind of perestroika that shapes Vladimir Sorokin's 1985
story Start of the Season to the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet
Union as experienced by ordinary people in Alexievich's Landscape of
Loneliness, these riveting stories chronicle not only the particular
dramas and upheavals of the Russian people, but also the tribulations
and triumphs of the human spirit.
