 | The Children of the Arbat: A Novel (Rybakov, Anatolii Naumovich. Arbat Trilogy, V. 1.) by Anatoli Naumovich Rybakov
Buy used from: £2.20 Criminally unknown in the UK, not even available in paperback! For me, THE finest Soviet-era novel
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 | The Master and Margarita (Vintage Classics) by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy new: £5.97 / Used from: £3.39 Impossible to summarise, truly outlandish, but definitively brilliant. Unmissable.
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 | Crime and Punishment (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Buy used from: £0.93 An absolute classic. The greatest crime novel ever ?
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 | A Hero of Our Time (Penguin Classics) by Mikhail Lermontov
Buy new: £6.37 / Used from: £3.82 Better than Tolstoy. Don't believe me ?
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 | Oblomov (Penguin Classics) by Ivan Goncharov
Buy new: £7.44 / Used from: £5.78 I was bought this as a student - it's about a guy who can't get out of bed - and it's just unforgettable.
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 | The Brothers Karamazov (Penguin Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Buy new: £6.47 / Used from: £3.65 It's a big brute of a novel, but you need to read it. He really was a bit of a genius.
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 | The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (Classics) by Alexander Pushkin
Buy new: £8.99 / Used from: £0.01 If you think you don't like shorts or novellas, try this and prepare to be proved wrong.
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 | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Penguin Modern Classics) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Buy new: £5.46 / Used from: £0.48 You really don't need to plough through the whole of The Gulag Archipelago. Ivan D. is superior in every way, including its brevity!
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 | Dead Souls (Penguin Classics) by Nikolai Gogol
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £4.30 Actually quite funny - by Russian standards! - but also very unusual and not a little macabre.
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 | War and Peace (Classics) by L.N. Tolstoy
Buy used from: £0.01 Yes, you do have to read it. And, no, you won't regret it. Not for a minute.
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 | Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Buy new: £6.29 / Used from: £0.01 OK, it's about the conflict between up-and-coming nihilism and over-the-hill romanticism, but what a writer.
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 | Death and the Penguin (Panther) by Andrey Kurkov
Buy new: £4.99 / Used from: £0.01 He's Ukrainian actually, but you still ought to read it. Slightly bizarre, very funny and highly readable.
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| And Quiet Flows the Don (Modern Classics) by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov
Buy used from: £2.50 Beautifully written, evocative and typically melancholic - and all you'll ever need to know about the Cossacks
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