In the 19th century Russia gave us some of the world’s greatest novelists and short story writers, the outstanding Men of Letters primarily from the golden cities of Moscow and S
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
PLOT SUMMARY A rumour spreads through Dagestan’s capital city, Makhachkala: the Russian government is building a wall to close off its Caucasus republics from the rest of the cou
At London Book Fair in March this year I met a charismatic and courageous young Russian author and literary critic called Alisa Ganieva, introduced to me as a “literary sensation
Moscow-born British author Zinovy Zinik lost his Soviet citizenship in 1975 and arrived in London via Jerusalem in 1976. Zinik has written 14 books of fiction and non-fiction in bo
Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a
Alisa Ganieva is a writer of fiction and essays. In 2009, her first long story – “Salam, Dalgat!” about her native land in the Caucasus – won the prestigious “Deb
Boris Akunin (pen-name of Grigory Chkhartishvili) – famous as Russia’s leading detective and crime writer, Akunin also writes ‘serious’ literary novels as well as essay
