This article was first published on lizoksbooks.blogspot.co.uk and last updated on Sunday, 9 July 2017. To see the regularly updated list, to find links to the books mentioned and
In the 1990s post-Soviet Russia was in the political limelight, but its literature was practically unknown. Formerly banned books were just starting to return, overlooked classics
After the Ball is a novella written by Tolstoy in one day in 1903, and turned out to be a prophetic insight into the horrors of the twentieth century. The story’s plotline is ce
If a day spent reading a book you love can be compared to a great festival, a joyous holiday, that holiday for me was the days and nights I spent reading Andrey Plantonov’s Found
In my personal list of the best of the best literary texts – written not only in Russian, but in any language – this relatively short novella would definitely be number one. It
A pseudo-autobiographical postmodernist poem in prose, this describes the entire drama of being a Soviet intellectual – in drunken conversations and reflections on board a suburb
This novel about childhood in Josef Stalin’s era of ubiquitous suspicion and informers makes any reader think deeply about how likely they would be to betray others just so they
Tolstoy’s final work wasn’t published in his lifetime. It is dedicated to the tempestuous nineteenth-century Avar rebellion leader and a hero of the so-called Caucasian War, wh
The Stream I glimpse my heart reflected in the water. Am I following the stream, or is it following me? We must both make our own way rippling over the unfeeling ston
China Miéville’s fiction output outnumbers his nonfiction by about three to one. So, while his political and academic credentials suggest that writing a history of the Russian R
