 | The Children of the Arbat: A Novel (Rybakov, Anatolii Naumovich. Arbat Trilogy, V. 1.) by Anatoli Naumovich Rybakov
Buy new: £22.83 / Used from: £1.75 Criminally unknown in the UK, not even available in paperback! For me, THE finest Soviet-era novel
|
 | The Master and Margarita (Vintage Classics) by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy new: £5.94 / Used from: £3.25 Impossible to summarise, truly outlandish, but definitively brilliant. Unmissable.
|
 | Crime and Punishment (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Buy new: £3.62 / Used from: £1.17 An absolute classic. The greatest crime novel ever ?
|
 | A Hero of Our Time (Penguin Classics) by M.IU Lermontov
Buy new: £2.97 / Used from: £2.64 Better than Tolstoy. Don't believe me ?
|
 | Oblomov (Penguin Classics) by I.A. Goncharov
Buy new: £4.08 / Used from: £3.45 I was bought this as a student - it's about a guy who can't get out of bed - and it's just unforgettable.
|
 | The Brothers Karamazov (Penguin Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Buy new: £6.49 / Used from: £3.28 It's a big brute of a novel, but you need to read it. He really was a bit of a genius.
|
 | The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (Classics) by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
Buy new: £4.04 / Used from: £0.01 If you think you don't like shorts or novellas, try this and prepare to be proved wrong.
|
 | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Penguin Modern Classics) by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
Buy new: £3.07 / Used from: £3.34 You really don't need to plough through the whole of The Gulag Archipelago. Ivan D. is superior in every way, including its brevity!
|
 | Dead Souls (Penguin Classics) by Nikolai Gogol
Buy new: £6.29 / Used from: £3.47 Actually quite funny - by Russian standards! - but also very unusual and not a little macabre.
|
 | War and Peace (Classics) by L.N. Tolstoy
Buy new: £5.85 / Used from: £2.15 Yes, you do have to read it. And, no, you won't regret it. Not for a minute.
|
 | Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Buy used from: £0.01 OK, it's about the conflict between up-and-coming nihilism and over-the-hill romanticism, but what a writer.
|
 | Death and the Penguin (Panther) by Andrey Kurkov
Buy new: £2.97 / Used from: £2.38 He's Ukrainian actually, but you still ought to read it. Slightly bizarre, very funny and highly readable.
|
| And Quiet Flows the Don (Modern Classics) by Mikhail Sholokhov
Buy used from: £4.25 Beautifully written, evocative and typically melancholic - and all you'll ever need to know about the Cossacks
|
Listmania!
