100 Best Russian Books of All Time (Updated for 2026)

1

Crime and Punishment: A Russian Realistic Novel

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5.0

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the

Recommended by Ben Domenech, Esther Perel, Irvine Welsh, and 3 others.

Ben Domenech

@SohrabAhmari @li88yinc @jgcrum @BlueBoxDave @InezFeltscher @JarrettStepman Maybe the best book ever written. [source]

Esther Perel

You can reread the Russians. They are timeless. [source]

Irvine Welsh

It is not a crime book in the way that we understand crime fiction today. Instead it is like an existential psychological thriller. [source]

2

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

4.9

Tolstoy's epic novel of love, destiny and self-destruction, in a gorgeous new clothbound edition from Penguin Classics. Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously

Recommended by Chelsea Handler, Marvin Liao, Audrey Russo, and 5 others.

Chelsea Handler

I don't know if I have to expound on why I love this book, but everyone should read this author, and this was the first one of his works I read. So, it's like a first boyfriend. Or my first Cabbage Patch Kid. [source]

Marvin Liao

Partner/500 Startups

My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]

Audrey Russo

Question: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path? Answer: Anything by Peter Senge. The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz Once you are Lucky, Twice you are good – Sara Lacey Revolutionary Wealth – Alvin Toffler Black Swan – Taleb Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen Pao. Creative Class – Richard Florida Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis American Government 101: From the Continental Congress to the Iowa Caucus, Everything You Need to Know About US Politics – Kathleen Spears The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Any book by Herman Hesse The Art of War by Sun Tzu. [source]

3

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

4.9

The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays t

Recommended by Randall Stephenson, Adam Townsend, Christian B Miller, and 3 others.

Randall Stephenson

CEO/AT&T

Favorite book: The Brothers Karamazov. [source]

Adam Townsend

@FinchmanWill @jposhaughnessy @Cernovich @mcclay_roman My son's favorite book of all time [source]

Christian B Miller

A host of deep philosophical questions are at work in the book: about, say, the existence of God, the nature of morality without God, and the role of free will. [source]

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4

The Master & Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov, Diana Burgin, Katherine Tiernan O'Connor

4.9

Mikhail Bulgakov's devastating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest period of Stalin's regime. Combining two distinct yet interwoven parts—one set in ancient Jerusalem, one in contemporary Moscow—the novel veers from moods of wild theatricality with violent storms, vampire attacks, and a Satanic ball; to such somber scenes as the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, and the murder of Juda

Recommended by Max Levchin, Neil Gaiman, Andi Dumitrescu, and 5 others.

Max Levchin

Co-founder/PayPal, CEO/Affirm, Investor

One of the finest works of fiction of the last century. [source]

Neil Gaiman

@Slavinskas_art I love that book. [source]

Andi Dumitrescu

If I had to make a more rational choice, I’d go with Ulises or The Master and Margareta, but I think that choice is a bit snobbish. [source]

5

War And Peace

Leo Tolstoi, Louise Maude, Aylmer Maude

4.8

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-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 his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daugh

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas, Cécile Fabre, Kate McLoughlin, and 6 others.

Andrei Maylunas

One doesn’t have to invent the bicycle, there is one: it’s War and Peace. It’s about how Russia won the Napoleonic wars, and moved into the first row of nations who dealt with European history. It’s set during the peak of Russian culture, the age of Pushkin, who created the modern Russian language. It’s the peak…The only thing I would recommend to modern readers is to skip all those parts – which are completely separate from the other parts of the book – where Tolstoy is philosophising about the role of the individual in history. It’s maybe 15 per cent of the book, in separate chapters, and I would definitely recommend to skip those because they are not interesting today. [source]

Cécile Fabre

One of the key questions that Tolstoy asks in the appendix is the central question of War and Peace: how can we explain the fact that, on orders, millions of people go out and kill one another, when they know that killing another human being is morally wrong? [source]

Kate McLoughlin

Tolstoy didn’t fight in the Napoleonic wars, but he did fight in the Crimean war, so he drew on his experiences in that when he wrote War and Peace. [source]

6

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

4.6

When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material

Recommended by Ev Williams, Bryan Callen, Ella Berthoud, and 3 others.

Bryan Callen

So here are my three must read books. I've been reading a lot of great books like: Outsmart Your Instincts, The Culture Code, and Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order, and sometimes when you read a lot of nonfiction it’s very enriching, sometimes you need a novel. I really believe you should take a minute and read something beautiful. Listen, listen to Lolita by Nabokov. But also listen to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and listen to Richard Poe narrate that. Those are two of the greatest feats of the english language that I can think of. Then there’s Fortress of Solitude, an amazing book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these are great novels. Cold Mountain is a beautiful novel, Snow Falling On Cedars, I mean they’ve been around for a while. But goddamnit, get those under your belt. Those are the novels I think you should read. You know Love In The Time Of Cholera it just makes you ache. Kind of like a Hemingway thing, where Hemingway “ahh!”, it’s the same thing, you know. So I don’t know, I’m a fan of all those books. Those are my 3 slash 20 books. [source]

Ella Berthoud

Even though it’s wrong, you sympathise with him because he can’t help himself and writes about it in such a passionate and empathetic way. [source]

Richard Cohen

It’s more imbued with references to the sun and using the sun as symbol or metaphor – almost a kind of character in the novel – than any other work in literature. [source]

7

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, et al.

4.6

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia—both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin’s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him.

Recommended by Henry Medine and Jordan B Peterson.

Henry Medine

Loved this book, had to read it twice! Dostoevsky is recognized as one of the most accomplished writers + philosophers ever. What appeals to me most in The Idiot is how deep and consistent Dostoevsky gets with his protagonist character, Prince Lev Nokolayevich Myshkin. Myshkin is constantly put through challenging moments where he is lied to, manipulated, stolen from but remains compassionate through it all. The stubborn consistency of Myshkin's compassionate character opened my mind to what it means to building strong character, to remaining constantly good when everything around you is chaotic. [source]

Jordan B Peterson

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky https://t.co/cInEojC9OO, a book from my great books list https://t.co/AxBNX3QpMb [source]

8

Notes From The Underground

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear, David Magarshack

4.6

Notes from Underground (Russian ??????? ?? ????????, Zapíski iz podpól'ja, also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld while Notes from Underground is the most literal translation) (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs

Recommended by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jordan B Peterson.

David Heinemeier Hansson

It’s such a lovely weird book. Partly, it’s Dostoyevsky giving us an account, through the fictional narrator, of his view on the human condition. Just one quote: “But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic”. The idea of humans being suckered into living only according to “logic”, and not only the vanity of such a pursuit, but the impossibility of it, is a wonderful antidote to much of contemporary morality and wonkness. In the same vein, I found the attack on the core underpinning concept of much of 20th century economics, that people are rational beings making rational choices to optimize their own advantage, so forward for its time. Notes from Underground is from 1864, yet manages to expertly debunk that narrow view. Freedom, not material advantage, is the “most advantageous advantage”, even when that’s the freedom to do yourself harm. (Any analysis of Brexit and Trump would do well to consult with Dostoyevsky). Also, major bonus points for being a short book, yet packing so much punch. [source]

Jordan B Peterson

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky https://t.co/WuSwComIfi, a book from my great books list https://t.co/AxBNX3QpMb [source]

9

Devils

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.6

Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-2. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to the devils that drove the Gadaren

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas, Ari Iaccarino, Ben Shapiro, and 1 others.

Andrei Maylunas

You can’t retell the book, but it’s about Russia and what’s coming out of it. It’s the chaos of politics and morals and religion at the end of the imperial period, reflected in this mystical Russian national character. It sounds silly to speak of, but there is a certain mystical quality to the Russian soul. [source]

Ari Iaccarino

I’m currently reading The Devils by Dostoevsky, and I expect to glean absolutely nothing from it but the pleasure of disconnecting from any other literature that requires me to learn a skill for the company. The overburdening characters and plethora of words for something that could otherwise be said in an instant is a type of therapeutic brain massage in an environment where saying as little as possible with maximum effect is the plow that tills the soil in startup atmosphere. [source]

Ben Shapiro

There's some light reading for you. [source]

10

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Eric Bogosian

4.5

Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 19

Recommended by Robert Conquest.

Robert Conquest

Yes let’s do that as I’ve quite a lot to say about old Solzh. It was a critical book – an entirely objective account of a victim in a labour camp. Just one day in an ordinary labour camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how is got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev and said, ‘This is awfully good, you ought to publish it’. And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, ‘The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in.’ [source]

11

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

4.5

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountere

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12

Eugene Onegin

Alexander Pushkin, James E. Falen

4.4

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in imperial Russia during the 1820s, Pushkin's novel in verse follows the emotions and destiny of three men - Onegin the bored fop, Lensky the minor elegiast, and a stylized Pushkin himself - and the fates and affections of three women - Tatyana the provincial beauty, her sister Olga, and

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13

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol, Robert A. Maguire

4.4

Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nicolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic.

In a new translation of the comic classic of Russian literature, Chich

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14

A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov and J. H. Wisdo

4.4

Excerpt: ...strict rules of the best taste

Recommended by Oliver Bullough.

Oliver Bullough

Lermontov wrote this novella directly after the unsuccessful Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nikolai I in 1825 which led to savage repression and resentment amongst young members of the intelligentsia who lost the ability to express themselves in any way. Many troublesome young intellectuals were punished by being sent to the Caucasus, which turned out to be a much freer environment for writers. Having offended the Tsar with his poem ‘On the Death of a Poet’, which was seen as an attack on Russian society, accusing it of being complicit in Pushkin’s death, Lermontov was himself sent to the Caucasus in 1837. [source]

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15

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy

4.4

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

How, Tolstoy asks, does an un

Recommended by Antony Beevor and Francis Spufford.

Antony Beevor

Life and Fate…is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century. [source]

Francis Spufford

It is about the strange interval of freedom during the Second World War in which the Soviet regime had to trust its people because it couldn’t compel their loyalty. [source]

22

1984

George Orwell

4.3

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

With extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity, George Orwell’s 1984 takes on new life in this hardcover edition.

“Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker

In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania

Recommended by Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Emma Watson, and 16 others.

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Steve Jobs

Founder/Apple

called this book "one of his favorite" and recommended it to the hires. The book also inspired one the greatest TV ad (made by Jobs) [source]

Andra Zaharia

These books and their core ideas have stuck with me the most and continue to guide me when I hit crossroads along the way. [source]

23

The Gulag Archipelago: (Abridged edition)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4.3

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn

Recommended by Jordan B Peterson.

Jordan B Peterson

"The Gulag Archipelago" audiobook is available now in the UK (https://t.co/FwqDKSEp2w) with a forward narrated by me as well as a Q&A with myself and Ignat Solzhenitsyn at the end of the book that I believe you'll enjoy! Who here has previously read the book? https://t.co/SHldoeI0sY [source]

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24

Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

4.3

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” somethi

Recommended by Francis Spufford.

Francis Spufford

Yes, Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. It is what Tarkovsky’s great and weird film Stalker is based on. The story, like a lot of Soviet science fiction, is set safely outside the Soviet Union in a capitalist wasteland, where interesting things can happen that you can talk about! [source]

25

The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.3

Accused of political subversion as a young man, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp — a horrifying experience from which he developed this astounding semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to ten years of servitude for murdering his wife.
As with a number of the author's other works, this profoundly influential novel brilliantly explores h

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26

White Nights

Ann Cleeve

4.3

White Nights, is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky that was published in 1848. Set in St. Petersburg, this is the story of a young man fighting his inner restlessness. A light and tender narrative, it delves into the torment and guilt of unrequited love. Both protagonists suffer from a deep sense of alienation that initially brings them together. A blend of romanticism and realism, the story appe

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27

Red Russia

Tanya Thompso

4.2

Among the many things Peter doesn’t know, he doesn’t know he’s an archetype, the Prince of Coins incarnate. He doesn’t know his fiancé is a fortune teller either. He doesn’t know Russian culture, politics, or language, but he does know American business. And he knows his fiancé speaks Russian. He thinks she can make him the new Tsar of the timber industry, but first they must survive a weekend wit

28

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4.2

Preview Summary

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society

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29

The Captain's Daughter

Alexander Pushkin

4.2

“The Captain’s Daughter” (also known as “The Daughter of the Commandant” or “Marie: A Story of Russian Love”) is regarded as Pushkin’s best prose work. It was first published in 1836 in the literary journal Sovremennik. This historical novel is dedicated to the events of the Pugachev’s Rebellion in Russia in 1773-1775. It tells the story of a 17-years-old officer, Peter Grineff, sent by his father

30

Voices from Chernobyl

Svetlana Alexievich

4.2

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl complex in Pripyat. English-language reportage on the incident has, so far, focused on facts, names, and data; Voices from Chernobyl presents first-hand accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they lived through. In order to give voice to their experiences

Recommended by Caterina Fake, Craig Mazin, Kate Brown, and 1 others.

Craig Mazin

Writer, Producer/Chernobyl TV Series

These are sources I found fascinating and useful. Not ALL of them, but a bunch. First up, obviously... Svetlana Alexievich's Voices From Chernobyl. Absolutely essential, and heartbreaking, reading. There's a reason Ms. Alexievich has a Nobel Prize. [source]

Kate Brown

It’s a very beautiful work and I think it gives you the emotional landscape of how people dealt with their anxieties, fears, the health problems that ensued, and their growing sense of disillusionment with their political leaders and the Communist party. [source]

Rebecca Altman

What follows events like Chernobyl is a politics of measurement. Who counts? What counts? Who does the counting? How are boundaries drawn for the purposes of counting and comparing? And what is discounted, or never counted at all? [source]

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31

The Twelve Chairs

Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov

4.2

Ostap Bender is an unemployed con artist living by his wits in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia. He joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to find a cache of missing jewels which were hidden in some chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the bejeweled chairs takes these unlikely heroes from the pro

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32

Oblomov

Ivan Goncharov, Marian Schwartz

4.2

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia’s serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov follows the travails of an unlikely hero, a young aristocrat incapable of making a decision. Indolent, inattentive, incurious, given to daydreaming and procrastination, Oblomov clearly predates the ideal of the industrious

Recommended by Andrei Maylunas.

Andrei Maylunas

We’ll do Oblomov. Again it’s classic, so I’m not going to comment on the story. But to understand it, let’s say it’s, from my point of view, one of the best books where you get the feeling of what’s called the ‘Russian soul’. There is the lazy landowner Oblomov versus his friend, who’s extremely decent, a nice Russian-German chap, Stolz. And it’s the whole story of Oblomov’s impotence, of the Slavic Russian character. If you want to spend a life marooned on an island somewhere, I would rather choose Oblomov than many other people: he’s wonderful, but he’s not a bore. I would say this book is the key to a big compartment in the Russian heart or character. Oblomov’s laziness and his impotence when it comes to doing something, combined with the best intentions and the most wonderful soul, and heart, and mind: that’s typically Russian. It’s a complicated combination but it does explain the Russian national character in many ways. [source]

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33

A Country Doctor's Notebook

M. Bulgakov

4.2

Brilliant stories that show the growth of a novelist's mind, and the raw material that fed the wild surrealism of Bulgakov's later fiction.

With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr. Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of freezing rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his

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34

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

4.2

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote rev

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35

Cancer Ward

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4.2

One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the “cancerous” Soviet police state.

36

Russian Fairy Tales

Aleksandr Afanasev, Alexander Alexeieff, Norbert Guterman, Roman Jakobson

4.2

Translated by Norbert Guterman

Illustrated by Alexander Alexeieff

In this most comprehensive collection of classic Russian tales available in English we meet both universal fairy-tale figures—thieves and heroes, kings and peasants, beautiful damsels and terrifying witches, enchanted children and crafty animals—and such uniquely Russian characters as Koshchey the Deathless, Baba Yaga, the Swan Maiden

Recommended by Max Porter.

Max Porter

It was like going back to a medicine box of two-dimensional things – it felt like a cool drink of water after a lot of sawdust. [source]

37

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles

4.2

The mega-bestseller with more than 1.5 million readers that is soon to be a major television series

He can't leave his hotel. You won't want to.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility--a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal

Recommended by Bill Gates and Henry Medine.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

It seems like everyone I know has read this book. I finally joined the club after my brother-in-law sent me a copy, and I’m glad I did. Towles’s novel about a count sentenced to life under house arrest in a Moscow hotel is fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat. Even if you don’t enjoy reading about Russia as much as I do (I’ve read every book by Dostoyevsky), A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story that anyone can enjoy. [source]

Henry Medine

I promote range and diversity. Thus, I recommend readers to expose themselves to as many different topics as possible. I usually have 2-4 books I refer back to at any given time. They range in topics from management, art, spirituality and philosophy. Trying to get the engineering thing going but don't much of a mind for science. [source]

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38

The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, C. J. Hogarth

4.2

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist and writer of fiction whose works, including Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have had a profound and lasting effect on intellectual thought and world literature. His literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Consid

Recommended by Lynda La Plante.

Lynda La Plante

I like this novel due to the extraordinary background on how it was written, at the same time as he was writing Crime and Punishment. He had a certain time frame and a page count of 160 pages to submit within four months. He had agreed a contract in September that he had to submit a new novel to the publishers, Stellovsky, by the first of November. In the event of failure to produce this book Stellovsky would be given the rights to reprint all Dostoyevsky’s past and future work at any time and without further payment. The result was The Gambler. [source]

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39

The Overcoat

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

4.2

The Overcoat which is generally acknowledged as the finest of Gogol's memorable Saint Petersburg stories, is a tale of the absurd and misplaced obsessions.

40

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich

4.2

From the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, comes the first English translation of her latest work, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and

Recommended by Sam Freedman and Stephanie Flanders.

Sam Freedman

@martinbright It's amazing. Have you read Second Hand Time? Best book of the century so far for me. Just incredible. [source]

Stephanie Flanders

The power comes from the stories themselves, the people she found and talked to. [source]

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41

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilevich, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky

4.2

When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered."

More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-wi

42

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Leo Tolstoy

4.2

By the time he dies, Ivan Ilych has come to understand the worthlessness of his life. Paradoxically, this elevates him above the common man, who avoids the reality of death and the effort it takes to make life worthwhile.

Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 1840224533 here.

Recommended by Oliver James.

Oliver James

It’s possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard Giuseppe di Lampedusa to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates. [source]

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43

The Nose

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Catherine Cowan, Kevin Hawkes

4.2

After disappearing from the Deputy Inspector's face, his nose shows up around town before returning to its proper place.

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44

Resurrection

Leo Tolstoy, Louise Shanks Maude

4.1

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption, achieved through loving forgiveness and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgivenes

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45

Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov

4.1

Librarian Note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic cons

Recommended by Maxim D Shrayer.

Maxim D Shrayer

I deliberately chose Glory over The Gift, but I have to get the American years in. There is Lolita in the back of everybody’s mind, of course, and 95 per cent of the students who take my undergraduate course are doing it because of Lolita. But I’m choosing Pnin instead for two reasons. Firstly, Lolita looms so large that I don’t have to choose it, but, secondly, because Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov’s American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma. Pnin himself is not Jewish but Mira, once Pnin’s beloved, is Jewish, and she died in Buchenwald. The story is punctuated by the tension of his trying to forget and being incapable of unremembering. Nabokov was one of the very first American writers to write extensively about the Shoah in a work of fiction. Nabokov wrote Pnin in the 1950s and parts of it were published in the New Yorker, so it is astounding how far ahead of his literary contemporaries Nabokov was in his thinking about the Shoah and how it might be remembered and memorialised. [source]

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46

City of Thieves

David Benioff

4.1

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.

During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by co

Recommended by Brian Koppelman, Leo Babauta, Nicholas Carlson, and 2 others.

Brian Koppelman

I’ve given it to 100 people. All of them thanked me and gave away a bunch themselves. [source]

Nicholas Carlson

Amazing recommendations. Thanks everyone. Just finished a book off this list: "City of Thieves." It was funny, moving, and thrilling. I also recommend it. https://t.co/mvmjjNpyHC [source]

The CEO Library Community (through anonymous form)

One of the best 3 books I've read in 2019 [source]

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47

Speak, Memory

Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd

4.1

From one of the twentieth century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory is Vladimir Nabokov's moving account of a loving, civilized family, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror, education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. The Nabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats who lived a life immersed in politics and literatur

Recommended by Anne Applebaum and Eva Hoffman.

Anne Applebaum

I still think it’s one of the most beautiful memoirs ever written. Although it’s not about the Russian revolution as such, it is permeated with a sense of loss and exile, as are all of Nabokov’s books. He evokes gorgeous countryside scenes of pre-revolutionary Russia, but at the same time has some distance from it – he recognises the awfulness of what he at one point calls his rather appalling country at the same time. [source]

Eva Hoffman

I love it for several reasons. First, it made me feel that it is possible to give written form to nostalgia. The lyrical affirmation of that was quite important to me. Secondly, his preoccupation with language. I kept looking for books which talk about language, and at the end of the book Nabokov has a dedication to the Russian language, or an invocation of it and his incredibly poignant loss of it. [source]

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48

The White Guard

Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov

4.1

Although less famous than Mikhail Bulgakov's comic hit, The Master and Margarita, The White Guard is still an engrossing book, though completely different in tone. It is set in Kiev during the Russian revolution and tells the story of the Turbin family and the war's effect on the middle-classes (not workers).

The story was not seen as politically correct, and thereby contributed to Bulgakov's life

49

Invitation to a Beheading

Vladimir Nabokov

4.1

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his final days in an absurd jail, where he is visited

50

War's Unwomanly Face

S. Alexiyevich

4.1

This book is a confession, a document and a record of people's memory. More than 200 women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941. More than 500,000 Soviet women participated on a par with men in the Second World War, the most terrible war of the 20th century. Women not only rescued and bandaged the wounded but also fired a sniper's rifle,

51

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4)

J.K. Rowling

4.1

It is the summer holidays, and one night Harry Potter wakes up with his scar burning. He has had a strange dream, one that he can't help worrying about...until a timely invitation from Ron Weasley arrives: to nothing less than the Quidditch World Cup!

Soon Harry is reunited with Ron and Hermione and gasping at the thrills of an international Quidditch match. But then something horrible happens whic

Recommended by Big Structural Change.

Big Structural Change

@siriusclaw Azkaban ftw! Goblet is the worst of the series. Great book though. [source]

52

The Complete Short Novels

Anton Chekhov

4.1

Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

The Steppe—the most lyrical of the five—is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon tra

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53

The Cherry Orchard

Tom Murphy, Anton Chekhov

4.1

Published to tie in with the world premiere at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

In Chekhov's tragi-comedy - perhaps his most popular play - the Gayev family is torn by powerful forces, forces rooted deep in history, and in the society around them. Their estate is hopelessly in debt: urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, they struggle to act decisively. T

54

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

Robert K. Massie

4.1

Pulitzer Prize winner Massie offers the tale of a princess who went to Russia at 14 and became one of the most powerful women in history. Born into minor German nobility, she transformed herself into an empress by sheer determination. Possessing a brilliant, curious mind, she devoured the works of Enlightenment philosophers, and reaching the throne, tried using their principles to rule the vast, b

Recommended by Elon Musk and 1 others.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.1

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely kn

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63

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.1

The Insulted & Injured, published soon after Dostoevsky's political imprisonment, clearly foreshadows his later preoccupation with unconscious psychological drives & their external effects on the lives of his characters. Where his later works carry these drives to inevitably dramatic conclusions, The Insulted & Injured confines them within the smaller boundaries of everyday event.
In this story th

68

The Luzhin Defense

Vladimir Nabokov

4.1

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his ca

Recommended by Dominic Lawson.

Dominic Lawson

The Luzhin Defense is far and away the best novel written about chess. [source]

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69

And Quiet Flows the Don

Mikhail Sholokhov

4.1

And Quiet Flows the Don or Quietly Flows the Don (Тихий Дон, lit. "The Quiet Don") is 4-volume epic novel by Russian writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. The 1st three volumes were written from 1925 to '32 & published in the Soviet magazine October in 1928–32. The 4th volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the 1st three volumes appeared under this title in 1934. The novel is c

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70

Russian Short Stories For Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Russian & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way! (Easy Russian Stories)

4.0

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81

The Foundation Pit

Andreĭ Platonovich Platonov

4.0

In Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation, but an immense grave.

The Foundation Pit is Platon

Recommended by Joshua Cohen and Robert Chandler.

Joshua Cohen

Platonov’s novel concerns the destruction of a Russian village or town and the digging of a foundation pit for a vast communist housing-block that the reader slowly realises will be the size of, or just will be, the world. [source]

Robert Chandler

Platonov I first encountered when I spent a year in Voronezh in the early 70s. I was on an exchange scholarship there and I had never heard of Platonov but it happens to be the city where he was born and somebody brought me a Soviet published collection of his work. About half his work was published in Soviet times. So, this made an immediate impression on me and I recognised it was something unusual. Back at home I started reading all the works that hadn’t been published in the Soviet Union, the surreal satire and extraordinary wit, and the creativity with language. The language immediately captivated me. [source]

82

Nicholas and Alexandra

Robert K. Massie

4.0

The story of the love that ended an empire.

In this commanding book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and

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83

The Queen of Spades and Other Stories

Alexander Pushkin, Andrew Kahn, Alan Myers

4.0

This volume contains new translations of four of Pushkin's best works of fiction. The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a nove

Recommended by Rosamund Bartlett.

Rosamund Bartlett

An astonishingly modern work. The precision and lucidity of Pushkin’s language make it read like something written yesterday. [source]

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84

Война и мир, книга 1 (тома 1 и 2)

Leo Tolstoy

4.0

«Война и мир» считается одним из самых значительных произведений мировой классической литературы, а также крупнейшим литературным достижением Толстого, наряду с его другим романом «Анна Каренина».

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85

Hard to Be a God

Arkady Strugatsky

4.0

The novel follows Anton, an undercover operative from the future planet Earth, in his mission on an alien planet, that is populated by human beings, whose society has not advanced beyond the Middle Ages. The novel's core idea is that human progress throughout the centuries is often cruel and bloody, and that religion and blind faith can be an effective tool of oppression, working to destroy the em

86

2000 Most Common Russian Words in Context: Get Fluent & Increase Your Russian Vocabulary with 2000 Russian Phrases (Russian Language Lessons)

Lingo Mastery

4.0

87

The Double and The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoevsky

4.0

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88

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Nikolai Leskov, Gilbert Adair

4.0

In this powerful and brutal short story, Leskov demonstrates the enduring truth of the Shakespearean archetype joltingly displaced to the heartland of Russia. Chastened and stifled by her marriage of convenience to a man twice her age, the young Katerina Lvovna goes yawning about the house, missing the barefoot freedom of her childhood, until she meets the feckless steward Sergei Filipych. Sergei

Nikolai Leskov, David Magarshack, V. S. Pritchett

4.0

Written over the course of Leskov’s career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of nineteenth-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

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97

Everything Flows

Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anna Aslanyan

4.0

Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among m

Recommended by Marci Shore.

Marci Shore

This unfinished novel by the Soviet Jewish writer pulls us into the Stalinist Terror. [source]

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98

Despair

Vladimir Nabokov

4.0

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - thirty years after its original publication -Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann Karlovich, a man who undertakes the perfect crime - his own murder.

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99

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

4.0

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.
Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tal

Recommended by Maxim D Shrayer.

Maxim D Shrayer

This is my favourite collection, and a lot of my own work on Nabokov deals with the stories. About 60 of them were written in Russian, ten in English. They cover four decades of Nabokov’s literary life and are representative of his dynamic as a writer both in Russian and in English, and as both a European and an American émigré. If you want to see his various predilections, the aesthetics and politics of Nabokov’s work, then the stories are a great place to go. Nabokov leaves a mark on the genre – some have argued that they are among the very best Russian, European, American short stories ever written. They are a great example of late, blazing modernism. [source]

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100

Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

Leo Tolstoy, Rosemary Edmonds

4.0

Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and color. Evident too in its b