Comprehensive picture of pre revolutionary upper-class Russian society and the revolutionary transition. Deals with the life of an intellectual and his heroic effort to preserve his capacity for reflection. Yuri Zhivago, doctor and poet, lives and loves during the first three decades of 20th-century Russia.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...

Having discovered the king's horns while cutting his hair, a young barber is sworn to secrecy or he will lose his life.

In nineteenth-century Russia, the wife of an important government official loses her family and social status when she chooses the love of Count Vronsky over a passionless marriage.

A psychological study focusing on a student in St. Petersburg who murders an old woman, a money lender, and her sister.

The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.

"Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, War's Unwomanly Face is Svetlana Alexievich's collection of stories of women's experiences in World War II, both on the front lines, on the home front, and in occupied territories. This is a new, distinct version of the war we're so familiar with. Alexievich gives voice to women whose stories are lost in the official narratives, creating a powerful alternative history from the personal...