Twelve powerful works of fiction, including Pushkin's "The Overcoat," "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Gorky, and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by Tolstoy, plus works by Gogol, Turgenev, more.

From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.

The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the twentieth century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the century. The selections reflect the various literary trends and approaches to depicting reality in this era: traditional realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism. Taken as a whole, the stories capture every major aspect of Russian life, history and culture in the twentieth century. The rich array of themes and styles will be of tremendous interest to students and readers who want to learn about Russia through the engaging genre of the short story.

"The articles in the Critical Companion offer analyses of Russian short stories that encompass the major aesthetic and thematic concern of the short story genre in the twentieth century. Each article focuses on a single story by authors ranging from Chekhov and Bunin to Nabokov and Shalamov, to Tolstaya and Pelevin; together they outline the developments in each author's oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian short story. The short story rises to prominence during periods of cultural and political transition when literary conventions and ideologies lose some or most of their authority. The Russian twentieth-century short story in particular flourished in a century that saw an abundance of such shifts: cultural, ideological, and political. In this collection, American, European and Russian scholars discuss some of the best twentieth century Russian short stories and their recurrent themes of language's power and limits, of childhood and old age, of art and sexuality, and of cultural, individual and artistic memory. The Introduction provides a discussion of the short story genre and its socio-cultural function. The book will be of value to all scholars of Russian literature, the Short Story, and Genre theory." --Book Jacket.

This dual-language anthology features more than a dozen, 20th-century tales translated into English for the first time. Contents include "The Fugitive" by Vladimir A. Gilyarovsky, "The Present" by Leonid Andreev, "Trataton" by D. Mamin-Sibiryak, and "The Life Granted" by Alexander Grin, plus stories by Vasily Grossman, Alexander Kuprin, Arkady Gaidar, and others.

The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the 20th century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the 20th century. The selections reflect the various literary trends and approaches to depicting reality in the 20th century: traditional realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism. Taken as a whole, the stories capture every major aspect of Russian life, history and culture in the 20th century. The rich array of themes and styles will be of tremendous interest to students and readers who want to learn about Russia through the engaging genre of the short story.

The incomparable John Updike selects the 55 finest short stories from America's bestselling anthology, published since 1915.