No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - 'The Overcoat', 'The Nose' and 'Diary of a Madman' - alongside lesser known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvelously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire. Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul.

Set during the Soviet era, a remote, police-run settlement called the Ninth Siding exists only for the mysterious Zero Train that halts there.

'A truly great translation . . . This English version really is better' - A. N. Wilson, The Spectator TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 This acclaimed new translation of Dostoyevsky's 'psychological record of a crime' gives his dark masterpiece of murder and pursuit a renewed vitality, expressing its jagged, staccato urgency and fevered atmosphere as never before. Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders alone through the slums of St. Petersburg, deliriously imagining himself above society's laws. But when he commits a random murder, only suffering ensues. Embarking on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was born in Moscow and made his name in 1846 with the novella Poor Folk. He spent several years in prison in Siberia as a result of his political activities, an experience which formed the basis of The House of the Dead. In later life, he fell in love with a much younger woman and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. His subsequent great novels include Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Oliver Ready is Research Fellow in Russian Society and Culture at St Antony's College, Oxford. He is general editor of the anthology, The Ties of Blood: Russian Literature from the 21st Century (2008), and Consultant Editor for Russia, Central and Eastern Europe at the Times Literary Supplement.

Yuri Buida grew up in the small town of Znamensk in the Kaliningrad region. This much-disputed territory in former East Prussia was occupied by Soviet troops in 1945; the German inhabitants were deported en masse. The Russians among whom Buida was born were effectively immigrants, and a sense of the transitory courses right through his cycle of short stories. Deprived of a sense of the past, the motley Russian dwellers of this 'settlement-town' - war cripples, bereaved wives, madmen and magicians - inhabit a dislocated world. Death is all around them, yet Buida animates their lives with unforgettable vitality and humour, and with a peculiarly Russian sense of the miraculous. His own prose style, by turns baroque, magic realist and savagely terse, is a formidable match for the subject. He fills his intense short stories, often no longer than half a dozen pages, with a plot around which most writers would be happy to construct entire novels. The Prussian Bride is a treasure-house of myth and narrative exuberance, with stories swing unpredictably between outrageous invention and often tragic reality. It is one of the most exciting discoveries of post-Soviet literature and a worthy win

Set in a dementia ward in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal setting into a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past. We meet Leo Tolstoy's twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother's womb, only to be born as Tolstoy's 'son'; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Stael who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass post-chaise and becomes Fyodorov's lover. (In her third and last life, she becomes mother and lover to Stalin). Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies - all described in a serious, steady voice - Sharov seeks to retrieves the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God. Cover design: Marie Lane. Russian critics have described Vladimir Sharov's writing as an almagam of Tolstoy, Doistoievski and Soljenitsyn."

The complete diaries that Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London, kept between 1932 and 1943 Confiscated by Soviet authorities in the 1950s, the diaries of Ivan Maisky, the USSR's ambassador to Great Britain from 1932 to 1943, have been unearthed, annotated, and edited for publication in a three-volume set that Niall Ferguson predicts "will stand as one of the great achievements of twenty-first century historical scholarship." Maisky's revelations illuminate Soviet foreign policy in the years prior to and during World War II, providing fascinating perspectives on London's political life and climate, key figures and events, and the Kremlin rivalries that influenced Soviet policy. Volume 1: The Rise of Hitler and the Gathering Clouds of War, 1932-1938 Volume 2: The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Battle of Britain, 1939-1940 Volume 3: The German Invasion of Russia and the Forging of the Grand Alliance, 1941-19

The theme of foolishness has long occupied an unusually prominent place in Russian culture, touching on key questions of national, spiritual, and intellectual identity. In literature, the figure of the fool - and the voice of the fool - has carried additional appeal as an enduring source of comic and stylistic innovation. Never has this appeal been stronger than in the past half-century, whether as a reaction to the "scientific atheism" and official culture of the late-socialist era, or as a response to the intellectual and moral disorientation that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. Persisting in Folly traces three contrasting phases within this period: the "praise of folly" that underpins acknowledged samizdat masterpieces by Venedikt Erofeev, Yuz Aleshkovsky, and Sasha Sokolov; the sceptical appraisals of the Russian cult of the fool offered in the 1980s by Viktor Erofeev and Dmitry Galkovsky; and the legacy of this conflicted tradition in post-Soviet prose. By combining close readings with a rich comparative and contextual framework, this book charts a new path through recent Russian literature and offers a wide-ranging consideration of the causes and consequences of Russian writers' enduring quest for wisdom through folly.