From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.

Twelve powerful works of fiction, including Pushkin's "The Overcoat," "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Gorky, and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by Tolstoy, plus works by Gogol, Turgenev, more.

This dual-language anthology features more than a dozen, 20th-century tales translated into English for the first time. Contents include "The Fugitive" by Vladimir A. Gilyarovsky, "The Present" by Leonid Andreev, "Trataton" by D. Mamin-Sibiryak, and "The Life Granted" by Alexander Grin, plus stories by Vasily Grossman, Alexander Kuprin, Arkady Gaidar, and others.

The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular - the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre à son apogée (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing - particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry?nosuke - Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.

This book contains 350 short stories from 50 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. Wisely chosen by the literary critic August Nemo for the book series 7 Best Short Stories, this omnibus contains the stories of the following writers: - H.P. Lovecraft, - Edgar Allan Poe, - Arthur Conan Doyle, - Katherine Mansfield, - Jack London, - Guy de Maupassant, - Virginia Woolf, F. - Scott Fitzgerald, - Edith Wharton, - Stephen Crane, - Susan Glaspell, - Kate Chopin, - Laura E. Richards, - Alice Dunbar-Nelson, - Louisa May Alcott, - Hans Christian Andersen, - Charles Dickens, - Nathaniel Hawthorne, - Henry James, - Mark Twain, - Charlotte Perkins, - Elizabeth Gaskell, - Herman Melville, - James Joyce, - Leo Tolstoy, - Nikolai Gogol, - Anton Chekhov, - Fyodor Dostoevsky, - Maxim Gorky, - Leonid Andreyev, - Ivan Turgenev, - Joseph Conrad, - Aleksander Pushkin, - Robert Louis Stevenson, - Robert E. Howard, - G. K. Chesterton, - Edgar Wallace, - Arthur Machen, - Ambrose Bierce, - Talbot Mundy, - Abraham Merritt, - Zane Grey, - Edgar Rice Burroughs, - Oscar Wilde, - Rudyard Kipling, - E.T.A. Hoffman, - Bram Stoker, - H.G. Wells, - Franz Kafta - Washington Irving.

This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera. Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of all sorts in Russian culture. How and when did a Russian national literature come into being? What shaped its creation? How have the Russians regarded their literary language? The book will uses the figure of Pushkin, 'the Russian Shakespeare' as a recurring example as his work influenced every Russian writer who came after hime, whether poets or novelists. It will look at such questions as why Russian writers are venerated, how they've been interpreted inside Russia and beyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Russia has a rich, huge, unwieldy cultural tradition. How to grasp it? This classroom reader is designed to respond to that problem. The literary works selected for inclusion in this anthology introduce the core cultural and historic themes of Russia's civilisation. Each text has resonance throughout the arts - in Rublev's icons, Meyerhold's theatre, Mousorgsky's operas, Prokofiev's symphonies, Fokine's choreography and Kandinsky's paintings. This material is supported by introductions, helpful annotations and bibliographies of resources in all media. The reader is intended for use in courses in Russian literature, culture and civilisation, as well as comparative literature.

Twelve superb tales by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Bunin, other masters. Excellent word-for-word English translations on facing pages. Also teaching and practice aids, Russian-English vocabulary, biographical/critical introductions to each selection, study questions, more. Especially helpful are the stress accents in the Russian text, usually found only in primers.