Recommendations based on "Idiot"

‘It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!’Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky’s groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ‘ant-hill’ of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence ‘underground’. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him – his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness.Jessie Coulson’s introduction discusses the stories’ critical reception and the themes they share with Dostoyevksy’s great novels.

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world’s greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-SmithA Penguin Classics HardcoverFrom a writer widely considered to be one of greatest ever of the form, Anton Chekhov’s short stories offer unforgettable character, crystalline expression, and deep, powerful mystery. Collected here are five of his very best tales, “The Lady with the Little Dog,” “The House with the Mezzanine,” and the trilogy “The Man in the Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love.”

Sasha Sokolov is one of few writers to have been praised by Vladimir Nabokov, who called his first novel, A School for Fools, "an enchanting, tragic, and touching book." Sokolov's second novel, Between Dog and Wolf, written in 1980, has long intimidated translators because of its complex puns, rhymes, and neologisms. Language rather than plot motivates the story―the novel is often compared to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake―and time, characters, and death all prove unstable. The one constant is the Russian landscape, where the Volga is a more-crossable River Styx, especially when it freezes in winter. Sokolov's fiction has hugely influenced contemporary Russian writers. Now, thanks to Alexander Boguslawski's bold and superb translation, English readers can access what many consider to be his best work.

A tragedy of Shakespearean force and intensity, Dostoyevsky's drama of parricide and family rivalry chronicles the murder of depraved landowner Fyodor Karamazov and the subsequent investigation and trial. Extensive notes explain the many literary and topical allusions and provide background information.

Hailed universally as Russia's finest comic writer, and by many as its greatest writer of prose, Nikolai creates a unique Ukranian world, from the darkest Gothic to folkloric levity. Here, this extraordinary countryside is revealed in all its variety in his first two collections of short stories. The only translation available of this cycle of stories, this edition captures fully the spirit and vigor of his important early work for the first time.

An anthology of Russian short fiction includes stories by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn

An enchanting collection of tales which showcase Anton Chekhov at the height of his power as a writerIn the final years of his life, Chekhov produced some of the stories that rank among his masterpieces, and some of the most highly-regarded works in Russian literature. The poignant 'The Lady with the Little Dog' and 'About Love' examine the nature of love outside of marriage - its romantic idealism and the fear of disillusionment. And in stories such as 'Peasants', 'The House with the Mezzanine' and 'My Life' Chekhov paints a vivid picture of the conditions of the poor and of their powerlessness in the face of exploitation and hardship. With the works collected here, Chekhov moved away from the realism of his earlier tales - developing a broader range of characters and subject matter, while forging the spare minimalist style that would inspire such modern short-story writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. In this edition Ronald Wilks's translation is accompanied by an introduction in which Paul Debreczeny discusses the themes that Chekhov adopted in his mature work. This edition also includes a publishing history and notes for each story, a chronology and further reading. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The last Tsaritsa of Russia, Alexandra Fyodorovna, was murdered with her family on the night of 16-17 July 1918 by agents acting on behalf of the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The dramatic story of the demise of the Romanov dynasty has been recounted many times and has captivated the imagination of generations of readers throughout the world. The recently declassified 1918 diary of Alexandra - published here for the first time in its entirety - provides something no other account could do: a glimpse of the Tsaritsa's thoughts and activities from 1 January 1918 until the night of her death. As the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra wrote in English, though her native language was German and she became fluent in Russian after her marriage to Nicholas. The 1918 diary takes us into her private world, revealing the care she lavished on her children during this period of revolutionary turmoil, how she felt toward her husband, Tsar Nicholas, and what she imagined about the profound struggle - between past and present, old and new worlds, the sacred and the profane - then occurring over the destiny of Russia. The diary reveals that even in her most intimate reflections, she remained the representative of a great system of belief that had prevailed for hundreds of years in Russia and that she and Nicholas hoped to perpetuate. We see in painful detail the tragic daily confrontation between this system of belief and the reality of the modern world that had, in every sense, broken free of her and Nicholas's control.

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and 1930s forever altered the country’s social and economic landscape. It became the first of a series of bloody landmarks that would come to define Stalinism. This revelatory book presents―with analysis and commentary―the most important primary Soviet documents dealing with the brutal economic and cultural subjugation of the Russian peasantry. Drawn from previously unavailable and in many cases unknown archives, these harrowing documents provide the first unimpeded view of the experience of the peasantry during the years 1927-1930.The book, the first of four in the series, covers the background of collectivization, its violent implementation, and the mass peasant revolt that ensued. For its insights into the horrific fate of the Russian peasantry and into Stalin’s dictatorship, The War Against the Peasantry takesits place an as unparalleled resource.

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.