Alma/Oneworld

Completed in 1933, but not published until 1962, over twenty years after its author's death, The Life of Monsieur de Moliere charts the life of the French playwright, from humble beginnings to later theatrical triumphs and political controversies. The work was met with disapproval by the Soviet authorities, who detected parallels between the lives of Moliere and Bulgakov, and viewed the work as a veiled critique of their own times. With a dazzling blend of biography and novelistic imagination, Bulgakov's eccentric and satirical take on the life of a fellow writer energetically captures the genius of Moliere, while revealing another aspect of his own self.

Written in Sergei Dovlatov's unique voice and unmatched style, The Zone is a satirical novelization of Dovlatov's time as a prison guard for the Soviet Army in the early 1960s. Snapshots of the prison are juxtaposed with the narrator's letters to Igor Markovich of Hermitage Press in which he urges Igor to publish the very book we're reading. As Igor receives portions of the prison camp manuscript, so too does the reader. Arguably Dovlatov's most significant work, The Zone illuminates the twisted absurdity of the life of a prison guard: Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term. Full of Dovlatov's trademark dark humor and dry wit, The Zone's narrator is an extension of his author, and the book fittingly begins with the following disclaimer: The names, events, and dates given here are all real. I invented only those details that were not essential. Therefore, any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious. And all fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental. What follows is a complex novel that captures two sides of Dovlatov: the writer and the man.

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia, and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with author's notes, extracts from Chekhov's letters to relatives and associates, and photographs.

The inexperienced and impetuous young nobleman Pyotr Grinyev is sent on military service in a remote fortress, where he falls in love with Masha, Captain Mironov's daughter — but then the ruthless Cossack Pugachev lays siege to the stronghold, setting in motion a tragic train of events. This volume also contains another work by Pushkin on the same theme, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion, which presents an impartial, meticulously researched history of the revolt, and was condemned as being subversive on its publication. Together, these two works provide a fascinating insight into the character of the peasant who tried to overthrow an empress, written with the clarity and insight of Russia's greatest poet.

In order to rescue his beloved Lyudmila, who has been abducted by the evil wizard Chernomor, the warrior Ruslan faces an epic and perilous quest, encoutering a multitude of fantastic and terrifying characters along the way. The basis for Glinka's famous opera of the same name, Ruslan and Lyudmila — Pushkin's second longest poetical work — is a dramatic and ingenious retelling of Russian folklore, full of humour and irony.

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task — an ailing, world-weary nobody — seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own impending death, gradually becomes disillusioned with his mission, and decides to embark on a new path which will lead him to tragedy.

In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe's masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera's eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unbridled feelings and tempestuous passions, which can only shatter the comfort and safety of her existence and force her to set off on a journey of spiritual awakening.

One of the many aspects of Alexander Pushkin's immense contribution to Russian language and literature, and perhaps the one he is most popular for, is his mastery of the love poem, a genre which he perfected like few others before or after him. This volume contains a selection of his most famous and enduring verse explorations of love, such as I Loved You, Night, and A Magic Moment I Remember, pieces which are crowning achievements of the European canon and still have the same timeless emotional resonance today.

A seventeen-year-old London girl flies to Los Angeles for the funeral of her mother Lily, from whom she was separated in her childhood. After stealing a suitcase of letters, clothes and photographs from her mum's bedroom at the top of a hotel on Venice Beach, the girl spends her summer travelling around Los Angeles in a bid to track down the men who knew her mother. As she discovers more about Lily's past and tries to re-enact her life, she comes to question the foundations of her own personality.

An unpublished writer and a chronic alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov is short of cash, at odds with the government and divorced from his wife Tatyana, who intends to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha. The prospect of a summer job as a tourist guide at the Pushkin Hills preserve offers him hope of bringing back some balance into his existence, but during his stay in the rural estate of Mikhaylovskoye, Alikhanov s life continues to unravel and all his problems come to a head. Populated with unforgettable characters, such as Alikhanov s fellow guides Mitrofanov and Pototsky or the KGB officer Belyaev, and presented here for the first time in the English language, Pushkin Hills is arguably Dovlatov s most personal work and a poignant metaphor on the Russian attitude towards life and art.

The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of Master and Margarita — now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature — was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression did not only apply to his art: in 1926 his personal diary was seized by the authorities. From then on he confined his thoughts to letters to his friends and family, as well as to public figures such as Stalin and his fellow Soviet writer Gorky, while also encouraging his wife Yelena to keep a diary, with many entries influenced or even dictated by him.

An exponent of the theory that William Shakespeare, the modestly educated provincial man from Stratford-upon-Avon, could not have written the works — full of erudition and accurate professional jargon — which are attributed to him, Mark Twain offers an eloquent and entertaining analysis of this issue of authorship, peppered with personal recollections of his own first encounters with the Bard's plays, on a boat on the Mississippi.

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement.

Monroe Stahr is a film producer at the height of his career, revered by the industry and in control of every aspect of his business empire. In his ruthless rise to the top, the young widower has had little time for sentiment, until he meets the beguiling Kathleen Moore, and the two embark on an intense but ill-fated relationship.

In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited a number of major cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Vienna. His impressions on what he saw, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, were first published in the February 1863 issue of Vremya (Time), the periodical he edited.

A unique stylish collection of six novels by Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, All the Sad Young Men, Tales of the Jazz Age, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. All the books have flaps, beautiful covers with foil and illustrations by Art Deco artist George Barbier. They also contain notes and an extensive apparatus.

Presented as a series of letters between the humble copying-clerk Devushkin and a distant relative of his, the young Varenka, Poor People brings to the fore the underclass of St Petersburg, who live at the margins of society in the most appalling conditions and abject poverty. As Devushkin tries to help Varenka improve her plight by selling anything he can, he is reduced to even more desperate circumstances and seeks refuge in alcohol, looking on helplessly as the object of his impossible love is taken away from him.

Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stays on longer than intended, Rudin exerts a strong influence on the younger generation, and gradually Darya's daughter, Natalya, falls in love with him. But circumstances soon show whether Rudin has the courage to act on his beliefs, and whether he can live up to the image he has created for himself.

Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful literary presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which — in concept and execution — affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author.

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task — an ailing, world-weary nobody — seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own impending death, gradually becomes disillusioned with his mission, and decides to embark on a new path which will lead him to tragedy.

Written in 1957, but only recently rediscovered in manuscript form in a New Jersey warehouse, Beat Generation bears the hallmarks of vintage Kerouac: flowing, stream-of-consciousness language, orchestrated with a jazz-like sense of adventure and rhythm. Entertaining and exuberant, and conjuring up a thrilling, smoke-filled, atmospheric New York of bygone days, the play probes the American working-class psyche and tackles profound questions of religion, mortality and rebirth.

Russia's literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman — a professor of black magic — arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master — a man who has turned his back on his former life and taken refuge in a lunatic asylum — and his past lover, Margarita.

Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection represents some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress.

Set in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev during the chaotic winter of 1918 — 19, The White Guard, Bulgakov's first full-length novel, tells the story of a Russian-speaking family trapped in circumstances that threaten to destroy them. As in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the narrative centres on the stark contrast between the cosy domesticity of family life on the one hand, and wide-ranging and destructive historical events on the other. The result is a disturbing, often shocking story, illuminated, however, by shafts of light that testify to people's resilience, humanity, and ability to love in even the most adverse circumstances.