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20th Century Russian & Soviet

Literature forged in revolution and repression: works of courage, resistance, and enduring artistry.

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

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.

Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak

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.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

Life and Fate

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman

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.

The Foundation Pit

The Foundation Pit

Andrei Platonov

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.

Moscow to the End of the Line

Moscow to the End of the Line

Venedikt Erofeev

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.

The Suitcase

The Suitcase

Sergei Dovlatov

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.

Voices from Chernobyl

Voices from Chernobyl

Svetlana Alexievich

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.

"One word of truth outweighs the whole world."