It is said that if you haven't read the great Russian playwrights and authors then you haven't read anything at all. This edition represents a collection of some of the greatest Russian plays and short stories,

It is said that if you haven't read the great Russian playwrights and authors then you haven't read anything at all. This edition represents a collection of some of the greatest Russian plays and short stories.

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Contents: Plays: The Inspector General: A Comedy in Five Acts Savva The Life of Man Short Stories: Introduction The Queen of Spades The Cloak The District Doctor The Christmas Tree And The Wedding God Sees The Truth, But Waits How A Muzhik Fed Two Officials The Shades, A Phantasy The Signal The Darling The Bet Vanka Hide And Seek Dethroned The Servant One Autumn Night Her Lover Lazarus The Revolutionist The Outrage An Honest Thief A Novel in Nine Letters An Unpleasant Predicament Another Man's Wife The Heavenly Christmas Tree The Peasant Marey The Crocodile Bobok The Dream of a Ridiculous Man Mumu The Shot St. John'S Eve An Old Acquaintance The Mantle The Nose Memoirs Of A Madman A May Night The Viy Essays: On Russian Novelists by William Lyon Phelps Russian National Character as Shown in Russian Fiction

An original selection of short fiction by Nikolai Gogol, “the Russian Dickens,” translated by the great Constance Garnett and curated by Natasha Randall, that captures the genius of one of the most daring, inventive writers of the nineteenth century. A wounded solider vanishes into notoriety. A nose is found in a loaf of bread. Places—like the Nevesky Prospect—are not what they seem. Nikolai Gogol was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest and most influential Russian writers, a realist whose acerbic observations and taste for the absurd give his writing its strange, comic voice. In this edition of A Place Bewitched and Other Stories, Natasha Randall presents a new, curated collection of Gogol’s short fiction, selected from the work of Constance Garnett, one of Gogol’s earliest translators. Randall has lightly revised Garnett’s essential translations and frames the collection with a new foreword. Full of the wit of Gogol’s work, this edition is the perfect introduction to a great writer and a must for the enthusiast.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, philosopher, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Dostoevsky's body of works consists of 12 novels, four novellas, 16 short stories, and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest psychological novelists in world literature. His 1864 novel Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. Dostoevsky was influenced by a wide variety of philosophers and authors including Pushkin, Gogol, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Lermontov, Hugo, Poe, Plato, Cervantes, Herzen, Kant, Belinsky, Hegel, Schiller, Solovyov, Bakunin, Sand, Hoffmann, and Mickiewicz. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre and the emergence of Existentialism and Freudianism. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages, and served as the basis for many films. (wikipedia.org)

INTRODUCTION Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative mystery than Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism; foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day. More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic's observation about Gogol: "Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life." But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in almost all of Gogol's work his "free Cossack soul" trying to break through the shell of sordid to-day like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are to our life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us.

Welcome to the 7 Best Short Stories book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors. This edition is dedicated to James Joyce. James Joyce was an Irish, modernist writer who wrote in a ground-breaking style that was known both for its complexity and explicit content. He also participated in the early days of poetic modernism in the English language, being considered by Ezra Pound one of the most eminent poets of imagism. Although Joyce has lived outside his native Irish island for most of adult life, his Irish identity was essential to his work and provide him with all the ambiance and much of the theme of his work. His fictional universe is rooted heavily in Dublin and reflects his family life and events, friendships and enmities from school and college times. In this way, he is at the same time one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most particularists of the modernist authors of English language. In this anthology the critic August Nemo presents seven short stories that bring the most emblematic elements of the style of this important author: The Sisters, Eveline, Araby, A Painful Case, The Dead, Two Gallants and After the Race. Bonus: James Joyce's Amazing Chronicle by Joseph Collins and James Joyce by John Macy. If you appreciate good literature, be sure to check out the other Tacet Books titles!