Best Russian Literature Books

1949. A group of Soviet scientists and engineers—political prisoners with special technical skills—are housed in a sharashka (a prison research institute), the first circle of Dante's Inferno where the least tortured souls reside. Stalin wants them to build a voice-recognition device to identify phone calls. Three days over Christmas. Solzhenitsyn's most politically comprehensive novel.

A Soviet cancer ward in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. Oleg Kostoglotov, a former political prisoner with cancer, argues about history, morality, and medicine with his fellow patients—Communist functionaries, doctors, nurses—in a hospital that becomes a miniature of the Soviet state. The novel Solzhenitsyn was prevented from publishing in the USSR.

Anna Karenina abandons her respectable life for a passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky — and both are destroyed by the collision between private desire and social convention. Tolstoy's great novel of passion and consequence contains the most famous opening sentence in fiction.

Three brothers — the sensualist Dmitri, the rationalist Ivan, and the saintly Alyosha — are bound together by the murder of their corrupt father. Dostoevsky's final and greatest novel asks the hardest question: if God does not exist, is everything permitted?

Raskolnikov, a destitute former student in St. Petersburg, murders a pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary people are above conventional morality — and then spends the rest of the novel being destroyed by his own conscience. Dostoevsky's most accessible masterpiece is the definitive novel about guilt.

Seven Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, with Saunders's line-by-line commentary on what each story is doing and why. Developed from his Syracuse MFA course, the book is a master class in how fiction creates meaning through moment-by-moment decisions of form.

Nabokov's autobiography covers his aristocratic Russian childhood, his family's flight after the Revolution, and his years as an émigré writer in Europe — in prose of such concentrated beauty that it reads as much as poetry as memoir.

A Moscow street dog is given a human pituitary gland and testicles by a surgeon, transforms into a crude, politically useful Soviet citizen, and must eventually be returned to his original state. Bulgakov's suppressed novella is the most precise literary satire of Soviet ideology ever written — the experiment of creating the New Soviet Man literalized as a surgical procedure with predictable results.

Pasternak's 1922 poetry collection — written in the summer of 1917, during the revolutionary period — made him immediately famous in Russian literary circles. The poems are extraordinarily sensuous: nature, weather, rain, and the body are rendered with a precision that owes something to Rilke and something to no one. The poetry at the end of Doctor Zhivago belongs to this tradition.

Pasternak's autobiographical prose combines memoir of his own development as a writer with extended meditations on Scriabin, Rilke, and Mayakovsky — the three presences that shaped his aesthetic. The book ends with Mayakovsky's suicide, rendered with grief that is also a kind of self-examination: the poet who chose visibility and the poet who chose obscurity, and what each choice costs.

Nabokov's last Russian-language novel follows young émigré poet Fyodor in 1920s Berlin as he writes, falls in love, and constructs an audacious biography of Russian literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky — an account of what it means to be a Russian writer in exile.

The Turbin family in Kiev during the winter of 1918-1919, when the city changed hands multiple times between the Bolsheviks, the German-backed Hetmanate, and Petliura's forces. Bulgakov's first novel is the closest to autobiography — the family is his own, and the account of a cultivated Russian family facing the dissolution of their world is rendered with a warmth and grief the later work deliberately suppresses.

A young novelist's work is accepted by the Moscow Arts Theatre and he is drawn into the labyrinthine machinery of Soviet theatrical production — committees, rewrites, egos, and a mysterious director who never appears. Bulgakov's posthumously published roman à clef about his experiences at the Moscow Arts Theatre is a devastating account of the relationship between art and institutional power.