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1084 books found.
Капитанская дочка
By Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
A young officer, Pyotr Grinyov, is posted to a remote fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the commandant's daughter Masha and runs foul of a rival. When Pugachev's rebellion sweeps over the fortress, an old act of kindness binds the rebel leader and the young nobleman in a dangerous friendship.
15 chapters · About 145 minutes of published text
Красный цветок
By Всеволод Михайлович Гаршин (1855—1888)
A madman in an asylum becomes convinced that the red poppies in the garden hold all the evil of the world and resolves to pluck them. Garshin's short tale is a moving study of illness and self-sacrifice.
1 chapter · About 21 minutes of published text
Крейцерова соната
By Лев Николаевич Толстой
On a train, a man tells strangers how jealousy drove him to kill his wife after he found her at music with a violinist. Tolstoy's story is a fierce attack on marriage and passion.
28 chapters · About 112 minutes of published text
Левша
By Николай Семенович Лесков
When the English make a tiny steel flea that dances, the Tsar's court sends it to Tula, where a squint-eyed gunsmith, Lefty, and his friends shoe it. Leskov's tale, told in a comic invented speech, honours Russian skill and mourns how Russia treats its craftsmen.
20 chapters · About 41 minutes of published text
Леди Макбет Мценского уезда
By Николай Семенович Лесков
A bored merchant's wife, Katerina Izmailova, takes the clerk Sergey as her lover and goes to murder to keep him. Leskov's tale of passion and crime ends in Siberian chains.
1 chapter · About 63 minutes of published text
Мать
By Максим Горький
Pelageya Vlasova, a worn-out factory worker's widow, comes to share her son Pavel's revolutionary beliefs and takes up his cause. Gorky's novel of the 1905 revolution became a model for Soviet fiction.
58 chapters · About 403 minutes of published text
Мелкий бес
By Федор Кузьмич Сологуб
Peredonov, a schoolmaster in a provincial town, schemes to win a post as inspector and slides into spiteful paranoia, sure that everyone plots against him. Sologub's novel turns the small-town grotesque into a study of madness.
37 chapters · About 366 minutes of published text
Мёртвые души
By Николай Васильевич Гоголь (1809—1852)
The smooth, ingratiating Chichikov travels from landowner to landowner buying the names of dead serfs who still count on the tax rolls, a scheme he hopes will make him rich. Gogol's comic epic of provincial Russia, here its complete first volume, is a gallery of grotesque squires, each more absurd than the last.
11 chapters · About 336 minutes of published text
Муму
By Иван Сергеевич Тургенев
Gerasim, a deaf-mute serf and a giant of a man, rescues a puppy he calls Mumu and loves it, until his capricious mistress orders it drowned. Turgenev's story is a quiet protest against serfdom.
1 chapter · About 38 minutes of published text
Мы
By Евгений Иванович Замятин (1884—1937)
In the glass-walled One State, where every hour is timetabled and people have numbers, not names, the engineer D-503 keeps a diary and begins to feel something called a soul. Zamyatin's 1920 novel is the first great dystopia and the ancestor of Orwell's.
40 chapters · About 209 minutes of published text
Накануне
By Иван Сергеевич Тургенев
Elena, a young Russian woman who longs for a great cause, chooses the Bulgarian patriot Insarov over her Russian suitors and follows him to Venice. Turgenev's novel sets her choice against the eve of the Crimean War.
35 chapters · About 199 minutes of published text
Народные русские сказки
By Составитель Александр Николаевич Афанасьев
Alexander Afanasyev's collection of Russian folk tales, gathered in the 1850s, holds animal fables, fairy tales and tales of Baba Yaga, the Firebird and Ivan the Fool, mostly set down as they were told. It is the great Russian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm.
280 chapters · About 1938 minutes of published text
Обломов
By Иван Александрович Гончаров
Ilya Oblomov, a gentle landowner, cannot bring himself to leave his sofa, let alone manage his estate or marry the woman who loves him. Goncharov's slow, funny and tender novel turns one man's inertia into a portrait of a whole way of life.
46 chapters · About 679 minutes of published text
Обрыв
By Иван Александрович Гончаров
The sceptical Raisky comes home to his grandmother's estate on the Volga and falls into the lives of his cousins Vera and Marfenka. Vera's hidden love for a radical outsider leads her to a precipice, in the last of Goncharov's three novels.
102 chapters · About 1050 minutes of published text
Олеся
By Александр Иванович Куприн
A city writer staying in the forests of Polesie falls in love with Olesya, a girl from the woods whom the villagers call a witch. Kuprin's early story sets their brief happiness against the suspicion of the village.
14 chapters · About 100 minutes of published text
Отцы и дети
By Иван Сергеевич Тургенев
The young nihilist Bazarov comes home from university with his admiring friend Arkady and clashes with Arkady's genteel uncle over everything the old order holds dear. Turgenev's novel of 1862 gave the world the word nihilist and set a generation of Russian thinkers against their elders.
28 chapters · About 250 minutes of published text
Очарованный странник
By Николай Семенович Лесков
Ivan Flyagin, a former serf and horse-tamer, tells fellow passengers on a Lake Ladoga steamer of the many lives he has led, from the Tatar steppe to a monastery. Leskov's rambling tale is a picture of a strong, simple and doomed Russian soul.
20 chapters · About 188 minutes of published text
Палата № 6
By Антон Павлович Чехов (1860—1904)
Dr Ragin, who runs a shabby provincial hospital and prefers philosophising to curing, falls into long talks with a patient in the madhouse ward. Chekhov's longest story turns the doctor's detached calm into a grim test of his own beliefs.
19 chapters · About 72 minutes of published text
Первая любовь
By Иван Сергеевич Тургенев
A sixteen-year-old boy in a country house falls for the lively, capricious young princess next door and finds she loves someone else, more secretly than he guesses. Turgenev drew the story from his own youth.
22 chapters · About 86 minutes of published text
Пиковая дама
By Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
Hermann, an engineer who never gambles, hears that an old countess knows the secret of three winning cards and sets out to wrest it from her. Pushkin's tale of obsession and a ghost at the card table is one of the finest short stories in the language.
1 chapter · About 33 minutes of published text
Повести покойного Ивана Петровича Белкина
By Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
Five short tales, supposedly gathered by a dead provincial landowner, take in a duellist's patient revenge, a snowstorm marriage, an undertaker's nightmare, a postmaster's lost daughter and a country girl in disguise. Pushkin's first finished prose is light, ironic and exact.
6 chapters · About 83 minutes of published text
Поединок
By Александр Иванович Куприн
Sub-lieutenant Romashov, a thoughtful young officer in a dull provincial garrison, hates the brutality and boredom of army life and falls into a dangerous love affair with a colleague's wife. Kuprin's novel caused a scandal for its picture of the Imperial Army.
23 chapters · About 297 minutes of published text
Преступление и наказание
By Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский
A starving former student, Raskolnikov, murders a pawnbroker to prove that an extraordinary man may step over the law, and is then eaten away by fear and guilt. A relentless detective and the gentle prostitute Sonya press him toward confession in Dostoevsky's great novel of conscience.
41 chapters · About 765 minutes of published text
Рассказ о семи повешенных
By Леонид Николаевич Андреев (1871 — 1919)
Five young revolutionaries and two common criminals wait in prison for execution, each facing death differently. Andreyev's story follows them to the gallows, with a plot against a minister at its start.
12 chapters · About 93 minutes of published text