Jim Nordon (31 and divorced) has problems. Disliking suburbia, he aims to recuperate as much as possible from the 21st century by renting an apartment on the top floor of Victoria Mansions, an Edwardian building in Southampton Row due for demolition in the coming year. A supposedly successful career in local government means he has denied himself his ambition to become a portrait painter. These problems, if not insuperable, are worsened by the fact that he has to write a report, if possible anonymously, on reducing costs in his own work place. Finally there is the problem of sex. He gains periodic sexual satisfaction from a convenient relationship, but he hires a young girl as PA to help with his report and falls in love with her. This relationship becomes the centre of his life. Although it is a happy love affair, it breaks down when the earlier relationship intervenes. On a Sunday morning after returning to his Manchester home he climbs a hill called The Steep. There he discovers his past. The episode determines him in his decision to change his life. A novel of perceptive characterisation and rich descriptions, written sensitively and poetically with touches of humour, explicit in its treatment of sex, it focuses on love and death and the universal need to confront the steeps that occur in life when choosing between creativity and expediency.

At its heart is the sinister warning Mary Shelley issued in the Introduction to her own Frankenstein: 'Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.' Who was Joe Richter? Anglo-Russian, intelligent, recently sacked as a translator and lobbyist, assaulted and branded because he had translated an unusually sensitive historical document. For adherents of a violent neo-Soviet cult he was a cheat and so much bourgeois filth. For a wealthy American businessman it could mean big money. For a Russian oligarch it could mean enormous political power. For his mother it could mean happiness. For his girlfriend it could mean serious danger. For Joe himself it meant that he had to be a new Frankenstein. Has he really been gifted with the power to be a Frankenstein, to create new life? Does his DNA or bloodline relate him to a recently deceased relative who was supposed to have such powers? Aided by the CIA, he flies to California to perform an act of revitalization, only to find that what this could mean for world politics also has a deeply troubling personal meaning for Joe himself.

Set in China at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, it is the story of a passionate love between an Anglo-American woman of mixed-race lineage and a Russian doctor. The story has its background a little known and yet crucial episode in early twentieth-century history. It sensitively explores a range of relationships, culminating in showing how a young woman can suddenly be so outraged by injustice that her boldness earns the respect of everyone round her. For this feat she becomes recognised as truly an American Alice who can work wonders.

During the Cold War, if you're a young British diplomat photographed naked next to a naked Russian girl wearing a white fur hat, you're likely to have been caught in a Soviet honey trap. Your career as a diplomat is probably wrecked. Ironically it may have an opposite effect by leading to friendship with a girl from the U.S. embassy and a joint involvement in creating a fictitious network of informants. But why does it have an immediate connection with a maverick Soviet rocket being retrieved from the North Sea and a threat, thirty years later, to assassinate the recently elected U.S. president? In Soviet Russia the answer was to be found in a so-called `forbidden zone.' Against all good judgement the British diplomat visits such a zone, meets a family member renowned as a rocket scientist and subsequently helps him to defect to the USA. Thereby the fictitious network is justified and the scientist is granted his lifelong wish. However, thirty years later Washington becomes deeply concerned when it is reported that someone, possibly the scientist, intends to assassinate the president during a one-night visit to London. A certain amount of available Cold War expertise is called into play to thwart the likelihood, but the real secret is revealed by the girl in the white fur hat who was there at the beginning and at the end. A novel about sexual relations and betrayal, genius and the genie of mockery, the dagger of God and the cross of forgiveness, it exactly reverses the likelihood of assassination and replaces it with everlasting love.

Prince Dmitry Rostov, Anglophile lover of English poetry, especially Shakespeare, has a bicycling accident. It occurs beside Wordsworth's "sylvan Wye". More sinister and worrying are a ghostly white figure, a strange black boat, a blood-red rose cast on the water, a train whistle and a gunshot, all of which make him witness to a "gap in nature" that will ultimately involve him in a unique quest for the truth. Finding himself less seriously injured than he thought, he receives medical care and a night's rest at the home of the beautiful daughter of Lord Irmingham, a devotee of the late-Victorian cult of Tolstoyanism. Discovering that the prince had once met Anna Karenina, Lord Irmingham insists on having him as an honoured guest at his large country house, Stadleigh Court, among other guests assembled for a soiree devoted to celebrating Tolstoy's ideas. But there is an important sub-text to the occasion, as the prince soon discovers. He is invited to confront the veiled, reclusive lady in the tower. Is she Anna Karenina? Is she now apparently alive and well and living at Stadleigh Court on the banks of the river Wye? Entrusted with the task of identifying her, the prince finds himself drawn ever more deeply into a sympathetic understanding of her situation, her concern for her son, newly arrived from Russia but suddenly struck down, her joys and fears, above all her talk of threats and, finally, her claim to have "enemies". The soiree when it occurs proves to be fatally tragic. Her death overnight forces the prince to investigate. By dint of clever detective work and a certain amount of good luck he gradually uncovers the specifically Russian reasons for her killing. An Epilogue to what is an ingenious and entertaining crime novel reveals how much more the prince has to tell his wife when she returns from visiting her mother in Russia.

Who should rule Russia? In an era of oligarchs and growing Russian wealth, the issue is not irrelevant. Equally, in the late nineteenth century, funding in university colleges was as essential as it is now. The novel is set in St George's College, Oxford, where mismanagement and factional rivalry have led to the urgent need to raise funds. A Russian Grand Duke, Eugene Saltanovich, has promised an endowment. Long resident in England, the Anglophile Prince Rostov, a former student at the college, is invited along with his wife, Princess Alisa, to a memorial dinner where he is to interpret the Grand Duke's speech. The occasion turns out to be a fiasco when the Grand Duke claims his dancing doll will save Russia. What follows is apparently murder and an attempted coverup that rouses the prince's suspicions. The Grand Duke's dancing doll proves to be a fact, but the alleged presence of nuns in the college leads the prince to realize that they offer a vital clue to the Grand Duke's, er, great idea. Rostov is witness to a further death, provokes a duel, finally uncovers the ambitious plan at the heart of the cover-up and the even more startling likelihood that, had the Grand Duke's, er, great idea worked, the history of the twentieth century might have been completely different. Ingenious, witty and original, The Grand Duke's, er, Great Idea is a quality crime novel based on historical fact, but strictly of relevance to the present day.

This collection brings together six of Turgenev's best-known `long' short stories, in which he turns his skills of psychological observation and black comedy to subjects as diverse as the tyranny of serfdom, love, and revenge on the Russian steppes. These stories all display the elegance and clarity of Turgenev's finest writing. Richard Freeborn was until recently Professor of Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one that can threaten establishments of any political or religious persuasion, and is especially potent in the modern era. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev's working manuscript, which only came to light in 1988. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Professor Freeborn??'s book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev??'s masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak??'s Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre??'s development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil???nyak??'s The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov??'s The Badgers and Furmanov??'s Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin??'s We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha??'s Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky??'s The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov??'s Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy??'s The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive andchallenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated.

This introduction to the study of the Russian novel demonstrates how the form evolved from imitative beginnings to the point in the 1860s when it reached maturity and established itself as part of the European tradition. Professor Freeborn considers selected novels by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Extended introductory sections to the studies of Dostoyevsk and Tolstoy deal with their earlier works. A final chapter summarises the principal points of contrast between Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, and argues that in certain specific ways, they represent the peaks in the evolution of the form of the Russian novel. Quotations are translated, but key passages are also given in the original. Professor Freeborn treats the novel as a literary form and avoids the overworked formulae on which much historical writing on Russian literature has been based. He is concerned with the literary development of a great form.

Goncharov's gentle satire on the failings of 19th-century Russian gentry and bureaucracy turns into something deeper and richer than satire, as he probes the character of a protagonist whose constitutional lethargy becomes a symbol for the malaise of the human spirit in an alienating world.