Today I Wrote Nothing
by Daniil KharmsTranslated by Matvei Yankelevich
Overlook Press, 2007, pp. 266
Daniil Kharms has long been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement is only in recent years, following the opening of Kharms' archives, being recognized internationally.
Akhmatova
by AkhmatovaTranslated by Tom Jones
Perdika Press, 2007, pp. 28
Osip Mandel'shtam famously observed that Anna Akhmatova ‘brought to the Russian lyric the wealth of the nineteenth-century Russian novel'. These two late, seminal sequences - haunted by Akhmatova's inspirational meeting with her ‘guest from the future', Isaiah Berlin - amply bear out that assertion, epitomising in deeply personal terms the tragedy that had befallen Russia.
Anastasia
by Vladimir MegreTranslated by John Woodsworth
The Ringing Cedars, 2008, pp. 227
"Anastasia", the first book of the Ringing Cedars Series, tells the story of entrepreneur Vladimir Megre's trade trip to the Siberian taiga in 1995, where he witnessed incredible spiritual phenomena connected with sacred 'ringing cedar' trees.
Co-creation
by Vladimir MegreTranslated by John Woodsworth
The Ringing Cedars, 2008, pp. 243
"Co-creation," the fourth book and centrepiece of the Series, paints a dramatic living image of the creation of the Universe and humanity's place in this creation, making this primordial mystery relevant to our everyday living today.
.jpg "The Tales of Belkin")
The Tales of Belkin
by Aleksandr PushkinTranslated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus, 2008, pp.100
After completing his epic poem Eugene Onegin, Pushkin retired to his family's house in the country at Boldino in 1830, where he produced his first prose masterpiece, Tales of Belkin. These stories are wonderful in their purity of form, humor, and understatement.
Say Thank You
by Mikhail AizenbergTranslated by J. Kates
Zephyr Press, 2007, pp.108
Mikhail Aizenberg has lived and breathed and had his being at the heart of the last generation of poets that came to maturity under the regime of the Soviet Union. He has been not only one of its most eloquent practitioners, but also its chronicler and interpreter.
.jpg "Red Shifting")
Red Shifting
by Aleksandr SkidanGenya Turovskaya with Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, Jacob Edmond & Natasha Randall
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, pp.143
Aleksandr Skidan is one of Russia's most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy.
As It Turned Out
by Dmitry GolynkoEugene Ostashevsky & Rebecca Bella with Simona Schneider
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, pp.143
Dmitry Golynko’s first English-language release, As It Turned Out, features both earlier and more current poetry, drawing on the author’s three books as well as internet and unpublished materials. The translators collaborated with the editor and the author to achieve the closest possible correspondence to the original Russian texts, all of which appear on facing pages.
The Naked Guest
by John FarndonTranslated by John Farndon & Lilia Belokonova
John Farndon, 2008, pp.74
27th January 1837. In the snows outside St Petersburg, the poet Alexander Pushkin, at the height of his fame, selects his pistol to duel with the alleged lover of his beautiful young wife Natalie... A powerful and touching play about human desire, fear and jealousy focusing on the lazy days and haunting poetry of Russia's greatest poet.
Paths of the Beggar Woman
by Marina TsvetaevaTranslated by Belinda Cooke
Worple Press, 2008, pp.133
The title of this book is an attempt to show Tsvetaeva as just one of Stalin's many victims, as well as a woman driven by a single-minded pursuit of her poetic muse. The 'Beggar woman' draws attention both to her desperate poverty and literal need to beg at times and to the various hyperbolic female selves seen in the poetry.
The Page and The Fire: Poems by Russian Poets on Russian Poets
by VariousTranslated by Peter Oram
Arc Publications, 2008, pp.132
An anthology of poems by the major literary figures in Russia, writing to, about, or in memory of other poets, following a tradition which started in the early years of the twentieth century and continued through the subsequent decades, more or less until the millennium.
We
by Yevgeny ZamyatinTranslated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus Press, 2008, pp. 218
The citizens of the One State live in a condition of 'mathematically infallible happiness'. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated. But over the course of his journal D-503 suddenly finds himself caught up in unthinkable and illegal activities - love and rebellion. Banned on its publication in Russia in1921, We is the first modern dystopian novel and a satire on state control that has once again become chillingly relevant.
Guests of Eternity
by Larissa MillerTranslated by Richard McKane
Arc Publications, 2008, pp.132
Larissa Miller is one of Russia's most highly-regarded writers - novelist, essayist and poet - and this selection from her collection "Between the Cloud and the Pit" (1999) spans her poetic output from the 1960s to the millennium. "Guests of Eternity" is a presentation, in chronological order, of poems written (but not published) in the three decades preceding glasnost' as well as the final decade of the twentieth century.
The Captain’s Daughter
by Alexander PushkinTranslated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
Hesperus Press, 2008, pp. 115
Pushkin's version of the historical novel in the style of Walter Scott, this final prose work also reflects his fascination with and research into Russian history of the 18th century. During the reign of Catherine the Great, the young Grinev sets out for his new career in the army and en route performs an act of kindness by giving his warm coat to a man freezing in a blizzard.
The Exclamation Mark
by Anton ChekhovTranslated by Rosamund Barlett
Hesperus Press, 2008, pp. 99
A civil servant stands accused of not understanding the rules of punctuation. He begins to go through the correct use of commas and semicolons before arriving at the exclamation mark, which, he realizes, in 40 years of writing, he has never used. From here he develops a bizarre and paranoid fantasy in which everyday objects transform into malevolent exclamation marks.
The Eternal Husband
by Fyodor DostoevskyTranslated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus Press, 2008, pp. 155
From one of the world's greatest prose writers, this is a remarkable psychological novel examining the duality of the human consciousness. Velchaninov, a rich and idle man undergoing a moral crisis, is confronted in St. Petersburg by Trusotsky, the loyal husband of Velchaninov’s former lover.
Wings
by Mikhail KuzminTranslated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus Press, 2007, pp. 112
A key text in the history of gay literature, Wings was published in 1906 to the scandalized reaction of contemporary society and the generations which followed. Its central theme of aestheticized sensuality has drawn comparisons with the work of contemporaries Oscar Wilde and André Gide.
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail BulgakovTranslated by Hugh Aplin
One World Classics, 2008, pp. 456
As a mysterious gentleman and self-proclaimed magician arrives in Moscow, followed by a most bizarre retinue of servants - which includes a strangely dressed ex-choirmaster, a fanged hitman and a mischievous tomcat with the gift of the gab - the Russian literary world is shaken to its foundations.
Dark Avenues
by Ivan BuninTranslated by Hugh Aplin
One World Classics, 2008, pp. 324
One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues - the culmination of a life's work of unrelenting challenge to Soviet dogma - took Bunin's poetic mastery of language to new heights.
Anna Karenina
by Lev TolstoyTranslated by Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes
One World Classics, 2008, pp. 876
Considered to be Leo Tolstoy's most personal novel, Anna Karenina is a resonant story which scrutinizes fundamental moral and theological questions through the impassioned and tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, "moral" life, standing for honesty and sincerity, passion drives her to adultery and this flies in the face of the morally corrupt Russian bourgeoisie.
Reality Transurfing
by Vadim ZelandTranslated by Gregory Blake and Natasha Micharina
O Books, 2008, pp.181
This is the first English translation of the first volume that describes a new way of looking at reality, indeed of creating it. It provides a scientific explanation of the laws that help you do this, building up a scientific model, speaking in detail about particular rules to follow and giving important how-to tips, illustrated with examples.
Demons
by Fyodor DostoevskyTranslated by Robert Maguire
Penguin, 2008, pp.787
Pyotr and Stavrogin are the leaders of a Russian revolutionary cell. Their aim is to overthrow the Tsar, destroy society and seize power for themselves. Together they train terrorists who are willing to go to any lengths to achieve their goals – even if the mission means suicide. But when it seems the group is about to be discovered, will their recruits be willing to kill one of their own circle in order to cover their tracks?
.jpg "A Dead Man’s Memoir")
A Dead Man’s Memoir
by Mikhail BulgakovTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
Penguin, 2007, pp.167
A Dead Man’s Memoir is a semi-autobiographical story about a writer who fails to sell his novel, then fails to commit suicide. When the writer’s play is taken up for production in a theater, literary success beckons, but he is not prepared to reckon with the grotesquely inflated egos of the actors, directors, and theater managers.
A Dog’s Heart
by Mikhail BulgakovTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
Penguin, 2007, pp.113
Dystopian novelette by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in Russian in 1925 as Sobachye serdtse. It was published posthumously in the West in 1968, both in Russian and in translation, and in the Soviet Union in 1987. The book is a satirical examination of one of the goals of the October Revolution of 1917: to create a new breed of man, uncorrupted by the past and above petit bourgeois concerns.
The Twilight Watch
by Sergei LukyanenkoTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
William Heinemann of The Random House Group, 2007, pp. 440
In Twilight Watch, the Others face their greatest threat yet. A renegade Other, his identity as yet unknown, has absconded with a fabled spell-book of untold power and appears bent on attacking the entire earth. Now forces of the Light and the Dark - the Night Watch and the Day Watch - must cooperate to stop him.
The Day Watch
by Sergei LukyanenkoTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
William Heinemann of The Random House Group, 2007, pp. 487
The morally ambiguous second volume in Lukyanenko's trilogy (after 2006's Night Watch, a major literary and cinematic success in Russia) portrays the epic supernatural struggle between good and evil from the point-of-view of the witch Alisa Donnikova.
The Last Watch
by Sergei LukyanenkoTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
William Heinemann of The Random House Group, 2008, pp. 394
While on holiday in Scotland, visiting a macabre tourist attraction, “The Dungeons of Edinburgh,” a young Russian tourist is murdered. As the police grapple with the fact that the cause of the young man’s death was a massive loss of blood, the Watches are immediately aware that there is a renegade vampire on the loose.
Nontraditional Love
by Rafael GrugmanTranslated by Geoffrey Carlson
Liberty Publishing House, 2008, pp.239
The scene is the twenty-third century. At the heart of the novel is a love story between a man and a woman who are forced to hide their feelings and pass as homosexuals. Nontraditional Love describes a homosexual world in which heterosexual marriages are forbidden. World history and the classics of world literature Tolstoy, Shakespeare... have been falsified in order to support the ideology of this opposite world.
Dying for it
by Nikolai ErdmanTranslated by Moira Buffini
Faber and Faber, 2007, pp.116
Hallway-dwelling Semyon is unemployed and disheartened with life. When his last hope for self-respect disappears, Semyon decides to take his own life. But word gets out and he finds himself inundated with sympathetic visitors - begging him to die on their behalf.
Boris Godunov and other Dramatic Works
by Alexander PushkinTranslated by James E. Falen
Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.2015
'The people are silent' So ends Pushkin's great historical drama Boris Godunov, in which Boris's reign as Tsar witnesses civil strife and intrigue, brutality and misery. Its legacy is an uncertain future for the new Tsar whose inauguration is met with devastating silence by the people.
Lizka and Her Men
by Alexander IkonnikovTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
Serpent's Tail; May 2007; pp.155
Lizka is a young Russian living an unexciting life in a backward rural town. After her first fleeting and unsatisfactory sexual experience sets the locals’ tongues wagging, she moves to a larger town – G – in search of a new life – and love.
White Guard
by Mikhail BulgakovTranslated by Marian Schwartz
Yale University Press, 2008, pp.310
White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical first novel, revolves around a Ukrainian family in their home city of Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin, adult siblings who have just lost their mother, find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Do Time Get Time
by Andrei RubanovTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
Old Street Publishing; August 2008; pp.521
Twenty-seven-year-old Andrei always knew his shady business dealings could get him into trouble. But aside from the odd scam or tax fiddle, he'd never done anything seriously wrong; nothing that thousands of other Russian businessmen weren't doing every day. And so he agreed to be the fall guy for his boss when things went wrong.
The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence
by VariousTranslated by Kirsten Lodge (poetry), Margo Shohl Rosen and Grigory Dashevsky (prose)
Dedalus Books, 2007, pp.343
The sensationalism and morbid pessimism that characterized French decadence in the late nineteenth century quickly attracted converts throughout Europe, including Russia. The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse brings together horrifying, dramatic and erotic short stories and poetry, most of which have never before been translated into English, by the most decadent Russian writers.
Memoirs of a Survivor
by Sergei GolitsynTranslated by Nicholas Witter
Reportage Press, 2008, pp.335
The Golitsyns were one of Russia’s most powerful families until the revolution turned their world upside down and life became a battle to survive. Sergei Golitsyn was just eight-years old, his head full of stories about knights in shining armour, but the reality was a bowl of gruel for supper and panic when there was a knock at the door. Nich
Akiko
by Victor PelevinTranslated by Marina Wright
Published as part of the magazine ‘London Miscellany’ May 2007; pp.8
The first ever winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, Victor Pelevin is one of the most prominent writers in Russian today. Since his debut, Pelevin's work continues to develop in adventurous ways. In his latest translated offering Akiko, a victim's obsession with an online porn site devolves into a losing pas de deux with a computer-generated concubine and her monkey Mao.
'Among Animals and Plants' and 'Fro'
by Andrey PlatonovTranslated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson and Eric Naiman
New York Review of Books; 2007; pp. 58
The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov's vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution.
Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology
by VariousTranslated by Various
Dalkey Archive Press; 2007; pp. 471
Prominent Moscow poet Evgeny Bunimovich selected representative work from forty-four living Russian poets born after 1945 to be translated and published in this bilingual edition. The collection ranges from the mordant post-Soviet irony of Igor Irteniev to the fresh voices of poets like Marianna Geide and Anna Russ—young women just beginning to make themselves heard.
Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot
by Viktor ShklovskyTranslated by Shushan Avagyan
Dalkey Archive Press; 2007; pp. 428
One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls "loiterature"—writing that roams, playfully digresses, moving freely between the literary work and the world.
Permanent Winter: New Poetry from Siberia
by VariousTranslated by Oleg Burkov, Larissa Fomenko, Andrei Konstantinov, Nika Skandiaka, Lika Sokolovskaya and Vitaliy Eyber
Smokestack Books; 2007; pp.83
This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, a selection of contemporary poetry from Novosibirsk, Siberia's largest city and the exact geographical centre of Russia. Writing about their extraordinary country, they have adapted Russian literary traditions to its exceptional conditions.
Sea Stories
by Alexander PokrovskyTranslated by Noah Birksted-Breen
Glas; 2007; pp.113
Even in the absence of war, the army, anywhere, is a cruel, unsafe, and closed world, perhaps more so in Russia due to its outdated compulsory national service and poor economic conditions. Now, thanks to the growing movement of Soldiers' Mothers Committees around the country, the public is increasingly aware of the realities of life inside the army.
We
by Yevgeny ZamyatinTranslated by Natasha Randall
Vintage Classics; 2007; pp. 203
The citizens of the One State live in a condition of 'mathematically infallible happiness'. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated
French and African Letters
by Ismail GaspraliTranslated by Azade-Ayse Rorlich
Istanbul: Isis Press; 2008; pp. 206
Through Ismail Gasprali's French and African Letters Professor Rorlich offers evidence regarding the scope of Muslim modernism in late imperial Russia contributing at the same time to a better understanding of the debates on gender issues that shaped the modernist discourse.
War and Peace
by TolstoyTranslated by Andrew Bromfield
HarperCollins; 2007; pp.885
War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men.
War and Peace
by TolstoyTranslated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Vintage Classics; 2007; pp. 1215
War and Peace is one of the richest novels ever written. Tolstoy’s enthralling epic combines history and fiction in his depiction of Russia’s lengthy war with the French armies of Napoleon and its effects on the domestic lives of those caught up in the conflict.
The Rat-Killer
by Alexandr TerekhovTranslated by Natalie Roy and B.T. Gall
Alma Books; 2008; pp. 347
Rats and human beings aren't that far apart from each other in "The Rat-Killer". As the political intrigue of phantasmagorical post-communist reality develops into nightmare, the greed, cunning and malice of the humans more and more resemble the behaviour of the large communities of destructive rodents, while the rats acquire more and more human features.
Exfoliation
by Anatoly RiasovTranslated by Julia Konysheva (pseudonym Julga Heiligenbeil)
Kaftan Smekha; 2007; pp. 44
Although 'Exfoliation', analogously to a classic dramatic performance, has a plot, climax and conclusion, this action is based not on the logical, but emotional and associative links. It is not the plot that plays the key tole (in spite of its being 'dissolved' in the performance), but categories and metaphors, being the conceptual stem.
