Books set in Russia

About the literature of Russia

Russia's literature includes Pushkin, its national poet, and Nobel laureates from Ivan Bunin in 1933 to Joseph Brodsky in 1987. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse, and the nineteenth century brought the great Russian novels. Writers often worked under tsarist or Soviet censorship. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was first published abroad in 1957, a year before his Nobel Prize, while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate in 1970, saw One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in a Stalin-era labour camp, appear in the Moscow magazine Novy Mir in 1962.

Start with Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, set among the tenements of 1860s St Petersburg. Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, translated from Russian, follows a restless officer on the Caucasus frontier, and Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls satirises provincial landowners as a swindler buys dead serfs.