20th Century Russian & Soviet

The Devil arrives in Soviet Moscow and wreaks havoc on its literary establishment, while a parallel narrative retells the story of Pontius Pilate. Bulgakov's wildly inventive satire is at once a love story, a farce, and a defiant act of artistic freedom.

A poet and physician is swept through revolution, civil war, and exile, sustained only by his art and a consuming love affair. Pasternak's epic is a hymn to the individual spirit against the crushing machinery of history.

A single ordinary day in a Soviet labour camp, recorded in meticulous, unsentimental detail. Through one prisoner's small triumphs, Solzhenitsyn exposed an entire system of cruelty to the world.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, a vast cast of soldiers, scientists, and civilians navigates the twin tyrannies of Nazism and Stalinism. Often called the twentieth century's War and Peace, it is a monumental reckoning with ideology and human resilience.

Workers dig an enormous pit for a utopian building that will never be completed, their bodies and language warped by Soviet ideology. Platonov's bleak, strange prose turns the promise of collective paradise into a grave.

A boozy intellectual narrates his train journey from Moscow through the Russian countryside, mixing philosophy, poetry, and vodka into a single delirious monologue. It is the funniest and most heartbreaking account of Soviet-era despair ever written.

An emigre in New York opens his one suitcase and tells the story behind each possession left over from his Soviet life. Dovlatov's sharp, comic vignettes capture the absurdity of life under a system that made the ordinary impossible.

An oral history assembled from testimonies of Chernobyl survivors — firefighters, evacuees, widows, and liquidators. Alexievich lets the voices speak for themselves, creating a devastating collective portrait of a disaster that has no end.