A sort of Soviet Don Quixote, this novel about a craftsman who wanders the U.S.S.R. hoping to ease human misery with his inventions is considered one of the most important novels of the Soviet era, and is now available in its full version in English for the first time.Chevengur is a revolutionary novel about revolutionary ardor and despair. Zakhar Pavlovich comes from a world of traditional crafts to work as a train mechanic, motivated by his beli...

An NYRB Classics OriginalFew writers had to confront as many of the last century’s mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman, who wrote with terrifying clarity about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different Grossman, notable for his tenderness, warmth, and sense of fun.After the Soviet government confiscated—or, as Grossman always put it, “arrested”—Life and Fate, he took ...

The first war novel by the author of Life and Fate and a stunningly accurate portrayal of soldierly life written at the beginning of World War II.Vasily Grossman wrote three novels about the Second World War, each offering a distinct take on what a war novel can be, and each extraordinary. A common set of characters links Stalingrad and Life and Fate, but Stalingrad is not only a moving and exciting story of desperate defense and...

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an i...

Description“In the steppe near Tashkent they came upon a never-ending ladder with wooden rungs and iron rails and that stretched across the earth from horizon to horizon ... Whistling and thundering, a snake-like wonder hurtled past them, packed both on the inside and on top with infidels shouting and waving their hands. ‘The End of the World!’ thought both Mahmud-Hodja the Sunni and Djebral the Shiite.”Set mainly in Uzbekistan between 1900 and 1980, The Railway introduces ...

In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini meet in Salzburg where they agree on a renewed assault on the Soviet Union. Launched in the summer, the campaign soon picks up speed, as the routed Red Army is driven back to the industrial center of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. In the rubble of the bombed-out city, Soviet forces dig in for a last stand.The story told in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters i...

The Road rings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to a...

Stories about the occult, folk religions, superstition, and spiritual customs in Russia by one of the most essential twentieth-century writers of short fiction and essays.Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a writer of great range and human sympathy. The stories on otherworldly themes in this collection are some of her finest and most profound, displaying the acute psychological sensitivity beneath her chara...

A New York Review Books OriginalEverything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many. Thus we also hear about Ivan’s ...

A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story.Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the st...

**“Wonderful . . . and full of life. This is a book for discovery, for pleasure and delight.” – George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at SixteenA revelatory volume of 2 of the 20th century’s great poetic innovators, Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov, in vibrant new translations by Robert Chandler**Offering a fresh angle on two of the most innovative poets of the 20th century, and grouping poems by theme, celebrated translator and poet Robert Chandle...

A selection of the finest short stories from “one of the most popular writers in Russia,” praised by many as the female Chekhov (The New York Times)Teffi's genius with the short form made her a literary star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. These stories, taken from the whole of her career, show the full range of her gifts. Extremely funny—a wry, scathing observer of societ...