"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.

Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as "Working Class Stories" or "Gay and Lesbian Stories." The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.

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.

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.

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.

Born "Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov" on March 16, 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia -- later renamed in his honor - Maxim Gorky would learn early the harsh lessons of life. He spent his early childhood in Astrakhan where his father worked as a shipping agent, but when the boy was only five years old, his father died, and he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. This was not a happy time for the young Gorky as conditions were poor and often violent. At the age of eight, the boy's grandfather forced him to quit school and apprenticed him to several tradesmen including a shoemaker and an icon painter. Fortunately, Gorky also worked as a dishwasher on a Volga steamer where a friendly cook taught him to read, and literature soon became his passion.

A masterpiece of 20th-century Russian literature—now in its first complete English translation “One of the greatest Russian writers of short stories” chronicles life in a Soviet gulag, drawing on his own years in a USSR prison camp and laying bare the perils of totalitarianism (Financial Times). Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen years that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second to appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin’s death in 1953. His stories are at once the biography of a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and a literary work of unparalleled creative power, insight, and conviction.