Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted 'St John's Eve' to the strange surrealism of 'The Nose', from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in 'The Overcoat' to those of the delusional clerk in 'The Diary of a Madman' - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. To this superb new translation - the first in twenty-five years and destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's short fiction - Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's works and to War and Peace.

'If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it' The Times Tolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's war with Napoleon and its effects on the lives of those caught up in the conflict. He creates some of the most vital and involving characters in literature as he follows the rise and fall of families in St Petersburg and Moscow who are linked by their personal and political relationships. His heroes are the thoughtful yet impulsive Pierre Bezukhov, his ambitious friend, Prince Andrei, and the woman who becomes indispensable to both of them, the enchanting Natasha Rostov. 'It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it' Andrew Marr VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

A magnificent new translation of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which when first published in 1991 was described by the TIMES as 'a miracle' and by THE INDEPENDENT as a near 'ideal translation'. The BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - Dostoevsky's most widely read novel - is at once a murder mystery, a mordant comedy of family intrigue, a pioneering work of psychological realism and an unblinking look into the abyss of human suffering.

This acclaimed English version of Dostoevsky's magnificent last novel does justice to al lits levels of artistry and intention; as murder mystery, black comedy, pioneering work of psychological realism, and enduring statement about freedom, sin and suffering.

'A must read' - Margaret Atwood 'It would be hard to find a book that feels more important or original' - Viv Groskop, Observer Extraordinary stories from Soviet women who fought in the Second World War - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature "Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to write the history of that war. A women's history." In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich set out to write her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from official narratives. Travelling thousands of miles, she spent years interviewing hundreds of Soviet women - captains, tank drivers, snipers, pilots, nurses and doctors - who had experienced the war on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories. As it brings to light their most harrowing memories, this symphony of voices reveals a different side of war, a new range of feelings, smells and colours. After completing the manuscript in 1983, Alexievich was not allowed to publish it because it went against the state-sanctioned history of the war. With the dawn of Perestroika, a heavily censored edition came out in 1985 and it became a huge bestseller in the Soviet Union - the first in five books that have established her as the conscience of the twentieth century.

This superb new translation--never before published--of one of Dostoevsky's major novels comes from the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. "The Adolescent (originally published in English as "A Raw Youth) is markedly different in tone from Dostoevsky's other masterpieces. It is told from the point of view of the nineteen-year-old narrator, whose immaturity, freshness, and naivete are unforgettably reflected in his narrative voice.
The illegitimate son of a landowner, Arkady Dolgoruky was raised by foster parents and tutors, and has scarcely ever seen his father, Versilov, and his mother, Versilov's peasant common-law wife. Arkady goes to Petersburg to meet this "accidental family" and to confront the father who dominates his imagination and whom he both disdains and longs to impress. Having sewn into his coat a document that he believes gives him power over others, Arkady proceeds with an irrepressible youthful volatility that withstands blunders and humiliations at every turn. Dostoevsky masterfully depicts adolescence as a state of uncertainty, ignorance, and incompleteness, but also of richness and exuberance, in which everything is still possible. His tale of a youth finding his way in the disorder of Russian society in the 1870s is a high and serious comedy that borders on both farce and tragedy.

"From the Hardcover edition.

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking conditions, brutal punishments, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom and hope; it describes the daily life of the prison community, the feuds and betrayals, the moments of comedy, the unexpected acts of kindness. To avoid censorship, Dostoevsky made his protagonist a common criminal, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. As a member of the nobility he had been despised by his fellow prisoners, most of whom were peasants - an experience shared in the book by Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who has killed his wife. Like his creator, Goryanchikov undergoes a transformation over the course of his ordeal, as he discovers 'deep, strong, beautiful natures' amongst even the roughest of the convicts. Notes from a Dead House shows the prison camp as a tragedy for the inmates and a tragedy for Russia. It endures today as a profound meditation on freedom.

The New Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; the most important since this great novel first introduced to the English-speaking world eighty years ago: 'Many consider CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Dostoevsky's finest masterpiece; of his novels, it is certainly the one that would profit most from an exact and well-informed translation, locating its 'newspaper' atmosphere in appropriate contemporary speech. This is has now received from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who also provide illuminating notes. They are to be congratulated on an outstanding achievement' John Bayley.

'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will do anything to save the imprisoned writer she loves. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky with an Introduction by Richard Pevear

With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Pevear and Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's classic novel that presents a clear insight into this astounding psychological thriller. "The best (translation) currently available"--Washington Post Book World.

A new collection of stories by the acclaimed Ludmila Ulitskaya, masterfully translated into English   “[A] magnificent collection . . . [by] a writer of boundless tenderness.�—Geneviève Brisac, Le Monde   While we can feel, know, and study the body, the soul refuses definition. Where does it begin and end? What does the soul have to do with love? Does it exist at all, and if so, does it outlast the body? Or are the soul and body really one and the same?   These are questions posed by the characters who inhabit this book of stories by the award-winning Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya. A woman believes that the best way to control her life is to control her death. A landscape photographer wonders if the beauty he has witnessed can triumph over decay. A coroner dedicated to science is confronted by a startling physical anomaly, a lonely widow experiences an extraordinary transformation, a woman whose life is devoted to language finds words slipping away from her.   In these eleven stories, artfully rendered into English by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Ulitskaya maps the edges of our lives, tracing a delicate geography of the soul.

Anton Chekhov's short novels are 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.
Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. "The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. "The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In "The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. "Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In "My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nauture culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.
In these five short novels, Chekhov's masterful storytelling and his profound understanding of human nature are brilliantly evinced.

'Not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communicated' Sunday Times Read this stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers. VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless seduces by its combination of superbly drawn characters, narrative brilliance and manic comedy.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

'This beautifully produced edition collects, in chronological order, fifty-two of Anton Chekhov's short stories written between 1883 and 1898. It is a 'full deck', intended to reflect the diversity and inventiveness of the author's lesser-known fiction ... compelling and even graceful' The Times Literary Supplement A masterfully rendered volume of Chekhov's stories from award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Chekhov's genius left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their superb renderings of fifty-two Chekhov stories. This volume, which spans the full arc of Chekhov's career and includes a number of tales translated into English for the first time, reveals the extraordinary variety of his work. Ranging from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, the stories are populated by a remarkable range of characters who come from all parts of Russia, all walks of life, and who, taken together, have democratized the short story. This is a collection that promises profound delight. 'The premier Russian-to-English translators of the era' The New Yorker 'The reinventors of the classic Russian novel for our times' PEN/Book of the Month Translation Prize Citation

Introduction by W. J. Leatherbarrow; Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

From the award-winning translators of The Brothers Karamazov, a superb new translation of the novel in which Dostoevsky set out to portray "a truly beautiful soul."

In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, a saintly man, is thrust into the heart of a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, as Dostoevsky's "positively good man" clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his moral idealism.

This wonderfully fresh and faithful translation—never before published—is sure to become the definitive edition in English.

Introduction by Malcolm Jones; Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Whilst serving in the Soviet army in 1973, Sergei Ovsiannikov was arrested and imprisoned for acts of disobedience under military command. It was while in prison, like Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, that he began to ponder deeper issues and on release trained to be a Russian orthodox priest. This extraordinary but short book is about his search for true freedom. The issues he wrestles with are profound and, like any confrontation with truth, it caused him great anguish and pain. As Ovsiannikov wrote: 'It was in my prison cell that I lost fear. I realised that if they sent me to a labour camp with a long sentence, it did not matter because I was free. Of course subsequently I came to realise that freedom is not given, you have to take responsibility for it.' It was during this time that he discovered Christianity and decided that this was the real meaning of his life. Later, after a period spent with the Russian Orthodox community in London, Ovsiannikov lived for the last twenty years of his life in Amsterdam in charge of the Russian Orthodox community. Drawing heavily on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin and translated from the original Russian by celebrated translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky with an introduction by Rowan Williams, this brief spiritual book is a small masterpiece of its kind.