T o illustrate the enduring relevance of Russian authors to world literature, a good place to start is the book recommendations made by experts on Five Books . These include masterpieces by Leo Tolstoy , Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vasily Grossman , recommended many times for their epic scope and psychological and philosophical depth.
Novels by Russian authors
“Tolstoy famously said of War and Peace that it wasn’t even a novel. In a sense, it’s a total history of that epoch in Russia in a fictional form…It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time.” Read more...
The Best Russian Novels
Orlando Figes ,
Historian
“Life and Fate… is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Read more...
The best books on World War II
Antony Beevor ,
Military Historians & Veteran
“Dostoevsky was a devout Christian and The Brothers Karamazov, his last and possibly greatest novel, was a heartfelt plea for the necessity of faith. The phrase ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is often attributed to Dostoevsky. He actually never wrote that, but the sentiment certainly runs through much of his work, and most especially through The Brothers Karamazov .” Read more...
The best books on Morality Without God
Kenan Malik ,
Science Writer
Many of Vladimir Nabokov ’s books have been highlighted as well, both early ones written in Russian and later titles that he wrote in English. Anne Applebaum called his memoir, Speak, Memory,
“This is my favourite collection, and a lot of my own work on Nabokov deals with the stories. About 60 of them were written in Russian, ten in English. They cover four decades of Nabokov’s literary life and are representative of his dynamic as a writer both in Russian and in English, and as both a European and an American émigré. If you want to see his various predilections, the aesthetics and politics of Nabokov’s work, then the stories are a great place to go. Nabokov leaves a mark on the genre – some have argued that they are among the very best Russian, European, American short stories ever written. They are a great example of late, blazing modernism.” Read more...
Best Vladimir Nabokov Books
Maxim D Shrayer ,
Literary Scholar
Short books by Russian authors
The good news is that it’s not compulsory to read brick-sized novels to find out what Russian authors have been writing about. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrote short works, too, and one of the pieces considered most influential on later writers is The Overcoat Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , which was turned into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich . Nobel Prize-winning Alexandr Solzhenitsyn ’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a short novel . In our interview on Mysteries Set in Russia , one of the recommendations from bestselling contemporary author Boris Akunin is Captain Ribnikov
“Lermontov wrote this novella directly after the unsuccessful Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nikolai I in 1825 which led to savage repression and resentment amongst young members of the intelligentsia who lost the ability to express themselves in any way… In A Hero of Our Time , I think Lermontov is expressing the rage and boredom of young people of his generation with the stultifying atmosphere of bureaucracy and control in Russia at the time” Read more...
The best books on The Caucasus
Oliver Bullough ,
Journalist
“This is the most celebrated story by a writer who is not quite so well known in English. It was written in 1864…it’s set deep in the heartland of provincial Russia, which Leskov knew very well. He grew up in Oryol, south of Moscow, and Mtsensk is a town in the Oryol region. Leskov had a lingering memory from his childhood of the funeral of an old man who was murdered by his voluptuous young daughter-in-law while he kipped under a blackcurrant bush on a summer’s day. This is what gave Leskov the idea for his story.” Read more...
The Best Russian Short Stories
Rosamund Bartlett ,
Translator
“It was a critical book – an entirely objective account of a victim in a labour camp. Just one day in an ordinary labour camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how is got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev and said, ‘This is awfully good, you ought to publish it’. And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, ‘The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in’… After One Day in the Life, Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but meanwhile he was hoarding the real killer book – The Gulag Archipelago. When he published that, he was arrested and sent to the West in handcuffs. That’s where I met him, in Zurich in 1976.” Read more...
The best books on Communism
Robert Conquest ,
Historian
Other timeless Russian authors
Alexander Pushkin is widely regarded as a foundational figure in modern Russian literature. Many of his works have inspired operas, including Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin . (Pushkin’s own life, which ended in a duel, has itself been the subject of an opera.) Anton Chekhov is known for his pioneering short stories and plays, which have influenced writers and filmmakers all over the world. In an interview on History , Peter Frankopan recommended The Cherry Orchard history books for learning about Russia before the revolution.
“His stories are mould breaking in the sense that nobody wrote short stories like Chekhov and now everybody writes short stories like Chekhov. We’re all Chekhovian now. He’s a very modern spirit who happened to write his great work at the end of the 19th century. But it’s completely 21st century thinking, it seems to me.” Read more...
William Boyd on Writers Who Inspired Him
William Boyd ,
Novelist
“You can read it in a long afternoon. It’s sublime in its literary style, even in translation. There’s a clarity and vivacity of characterization which makes the characters very memorable. It’s also a very contemporary book. The culture wars we’re having today were described by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons …The other thing about Turgenev and this book is that it was the first novel to put Russian literature on the map. There had been translations of Gogol and Pushkin and, for me, Turgenev’s masterpiece is Sketches from a Hunter’s Album , which came out 10 years before and was badly translated into French. But Fathers and Sons really hit the big time. In Germany Turgenev suddenly became the most-read author. It established what a Russian novel was and held that position for 20 years until suddenly, in the mid-1880s, people discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the big sprawling novel became what Russian novels were meant to be like.” Read more...
The Best Russian Novels
Orlando Figes ,
Historian
“Again it’s classic, so I’m not going to comment on the story. But to understand it, let’s say it’s, from my point of view, one of the best books where you get the feeling of what’s called the ‘Russian soul’. There is the lazy landowner Oblomov versus his friend, who’s extremely decent, a nice Russian-German chap, Stolz. And it’s the whole story of Oblomov’s impotence, of the Slavic Russian character. If you want to spend a life marooned on an island somewhere, I would rather choose Oblomov than many other people: he’s wonderful, but he’s not a bore. I would say this book is the key to a big compartment in the Russian heart or character. Oblomov’s laziness and his impotence when it comes to doing something, combined with the best intentions and the most wonderful soul, and heart, and mind: that’s typically Russian. It’s a complicated combination but it does explain the Russian national character in many ways.” Read more...
The best books on Tsarist Russia
Andrei Maylunas ,
Historian
Modern classics
Russia’s tumultuous 20th century provided fertile ground for literature exploring universal themes of human existence, such as love, separation and endurance. Many authors — including acclaimed poets Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam — wrote from personal experience about war, famine and political repression. In the second half of the 20th century, the space race ushered in a golden age for science fiction .
“It is an incredible piece of literature. Babel has an aesthetic that corresponds to not only his sensibility, but also to his awkward circumstance…. It was tricky for him: how to bear witness to things, how to talk about the fact that Cossacks were killing Jews, without being sent before a firing squad.” Read more...
Aleksandar Hemon on Man’s Inhumanity to Man
Aleksandar Hemon ,
Novelist
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian and Soviet author of intense and lyrical verse. Initially more of a romantic poet, she is now best known for her long narrative works Requiem and Poem Without a Hero, bearing witness to human suffering, death and survival during Stalin’s purges and the Siege of Leningrad.
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“So the Cossacks can be heroic, but they have to lose, and do, to modern industrial Soviet forces of progress. But don’t let that trouble you, the scenes about Cossack village life are some of the best in all literature about rural lives. Think Tolstoy for the early twentieth century, a revolutionary age. The book is a grand, sweeping, historic epic, and earned its author a Nobel Prize.” Read more...
Modern Classics
James Rebanks ,
“I like that he invented his own name. He was born Daniil Ivánovich Yuvatchov. It marks a step into artificiality. He was a necessarily political author – he died in prison after falling foul of the Soviet regime in 1942, as many people did. But his absurdism seems to be more socially or linguistically oriented” Read more...
The Best Absurdist Literature
Joanna Walsh ,
“The Master and Margarita is brilliant, not only for its interweaving of past and present and linking of different timelines with the Pontius Pilate story, but also the complexity of the relationship between good and evil in it. You really feel for the evil characters — you find yourself backing them completely in their worst actions. The Rolling Stones song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was heavily inspired by The Master and Margarita . It’s a beautiful commentary and reflection on questions like ‘what are we doing in our lives, why are we here?'” Read more...
The best books on Surrealism and the Brain
Bradley Voytek ,
Medical Scientist
Doctor Zhivago — first published in Italy in 1957 from a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union — is set in the early part of the 20th century, with an epilogue in World War Two. The story centres on Yuri Zhivago and his love affair with the beautiful Lara. With characters buffeted by revolution, civil war and famine, the novel raises questions about individual agency and moral responsibility amid such upheaval, about fate and coincidence. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago , but declined it in order to avoid exile. Allegedly, Khrushchev read the novel after he was ousted from power, and regretted having banned it.
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“Of all the books of the Gulag, the one that struck me the most is this because it is just so brutally matter of fact. It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in Russia’s polar northeast, and Shalamov himself spent 17 years there. This is not an overtly literary description of his experiences: it is written with such clarity and coldness that the brutality and the dehumanisation of the Gulag is palpable.” Read more...
The best books on Race and Slavery
David Olusoga ,
Historian
“Brodsky lived through the first part of the siege as a baby, in a one-room flat on the Liteiny, right in the centre of town. He brilliantly describes the atmosphere of the postwar city: the bombed-out buildings – ‘haggard and hollow-eyed’ – and the feeling of emptiness, of crowding ghosts. He’s good, as well, on how pinched and harsh life continued to be well after the war. One of his earliest memories is of being given a white bread roll – not a common black one – for the first time. It was such an event that he ate it standing on a table, surrounded by admiring adults.” Read more...
The best books on The Siege of Leningrad
Anna Reid ,
Journalist
“Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. Roadside Picnic is, among other things, a wonderful indirect metaphorical reflection on everything about Soviet Russia – from its terrible scrappy industrial texture, through to the way that the possibility of miracles kept bobbing on through the wasteland like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s about the way that industrial grime and decay always coincided with promises that at any moment things could be radiantly wonderful.” Read more...
The best books on 20th Century Russia
Francis Spufford ,
Historian
What of contemporary authors writing in Russian?
At risk of offending readers whose favourite authors have not been mentioned: Lyudmila Ulitskaya, now in her 80s, has won a raft of Russian and international awards, as has Mikhail Shishkin. Svetlana Alexievich , the first Belarusian to win the Nobel Prize , writes oral histories, several of which have been recommended on Five Books . Andrei Kurkov , a Ukrainian writer known for his darkly humorous post-Soviet novels such as Death and the Penguin
“She is one of the greatest writers of our age. This is an early work, recording and retelling the stories of elderly Soviet citizens about the days in the Second World War when the war reached their villages. Children’s memories of hell being unleashed. It is the most beautiful, brilliant, heartbreakingly sad book I have ever read.” Read more...
Modern Classics
James Rebanks ,
“The Oprichniki were the henchmen of Ivan the Terrible. So it’s a 16th-century Russian theme transposed into the future. It’s a dystopian novel—following in that Russian tradition of dystopian writing of Zamyatin etc.—and is quite clearly a political satire of the Putin regime. It’s funny, it’s iconoclastic and it’s terrifying because although it was written in 2006, it seems to me that it’s describing what Russia is now becoming. I’m haunted by this book.” Read more...
The Best Russian Novels
Orlando Figes ,
Historian
Memoirs
For readers interested in Russian history , memoirs by Russian authors are rich seams to mine. Best known for his novel Life and Fate , Vasily Grossman also wrote eyewitness accounts of the Eastern Front in World War 2 , where he was a reporter. His notes were collected in A Writer at War Antony Beevor and Lyuba Vinogradova . In our interview on Books from the KGB Archives , Vinogradova — who has also written books about Soviet women fighter pilots and female Red Army snipers — recommends Olga Sliozberg’s My Journey as the best Gulag memoir. Our interviewees have also recommended memoirs, including those of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, Leon Trotsky and Nikita Khrushchev. A more recent autobiography that has garnered attention is Alexei Navalny’s award-winning prison diaries, published posthumously.
“I absolutely adore this gulag memoir. It’s special. I don’t normally read this sort of literature because it’s so gloomy and actually quite dull, this monotonous suffering and nothing else. Usually, if you do read this kind of book, you certainly don’t want to reread it. But this is completely different. She writes so well: a light, beautiful, elegant kind of writing. Its main message is that what you have at the end of your life is not the result of the circumstances in which you’ve been living but of what is inside you and what you did with that.” Read more...
Books from the KGB Archives
Lyuba Vinogradova ,
Historian
“Stalin had three children, but the one he was closest to when she was young was Svetlana. She was born in 1926, so there are many early pictures of her with him and other members of the Politburo, out at the dacha, and so on. Her mother died by her own hand—evidently after a quarrel with Stalin—when Svetlana was about six. The Letters are written after Stalin’s death, but also after Khrushchev’s dethronement of Stalin in 1956, when he criticized the excesses of Stalinism. Svetlana herself shares these criticisms. But she still loves her father, though she was estranged from him in adult life, mainly. For her, he’s a very problematic father, but also a beloved one.” Read more...
The best books on The Soviet Union
Sheila Fitzpatrick ,
Historian
“This is one of the books I read when I was starting to move into historical study. It’s a wonderful memoir of a childhood and young adulthood. Trotsky is a wonderful writer. I think he is one of the two great political writers of the 20th century, the other being Winston Churchill. But, as you move through the book, you get a very strong sense of a man who is justifying his own politics and his own career choices. He gets less and less attractive and less and less plausible as the first half of the book gives way to the second half. In that sense it was a very influential work for me because I started thinking that he was a very attractive man and I ended up thinking that he was a very unattractive politician whose self-justification for the terror and the dictatorship and the ultra centralist discipline that he imposed didn’t have much merit.” Read more...
The best books on Totalitarian Russia
Robert Service ,
Historian
“Khrushchev has such an original voice. He talked it all into a tape recorder…The informational content is extraordinary because it’s very rare that you get a national leader who gives you, with such immediacy and in such detail, his take on a whole range of things. There’s the Stalin period, his own dealings with the West, his own policies, his relationships with colleagues, etc. It’s often unexpected, because Khrushchev really was a non-standard kind of person. He has his own take on things, and he doesn’t feel a great need to wrap things up and smooth things down. That wasn’t his style. And so you get an awful lot of unvarnished observations and reactions, which I find fascinating, in that book.” Read more...
The best books on The Soviet Union
Sheila Fitzpatrick ,
Historian
by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
🏆 Winner of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Prize for Autobiography
Read expert recommendations
“It starts as an autobiography of his life: how he grew up, the various military towns he lived in, where he spent his summers in Ukraine, and what the best time he had was. He then goes through his political evolution in Russia, and then the most dramatic pages of the book and most transformative reading is when Navalny writes from prison. It’s his prison diaries. Then, that prison diary turns into his testament, the last words of a person who knows where this is going.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova ,
Political Scientist
“Kropotkin was a revolutionary and an anarchist theoretician. One reason I chose this book was to highlight the anarchist strand of abolitionist thought, which opposes all forms of government. Also with Kropotkin, this is a person who spent two years in a Russian prison, and three years in a French prison. He’s drawing on that experience in addition to his broader theoretical point of view as a communist and a person who supports decentralized communities…He is a kind of communist, one that favors fairly small communities of workers sharing the work and sharing the product of that work in an equitable way, consciously attending to each other’s needs. It’s not a community of strangers. It’s not mass society. So it’s a particular way of thinking about what it means for us to live with one another in a way that’s just and humane.” Read more...
The best books on Prison Abolition
Tommie Shelby ,
Philosopher
Nonfiction
Every year, the Pushkin House Book Prize celebrates the best new nonfiction writing about Russia. Although the prize is for books published in English, sometimes they are works by Russian authors in translation. The winner in 2024 was I Love Russia Anna Politkovskaya . In Return of the Russian Leviathan
“Sergei is a deep thinker. With his knowledge of sociology, of political psychology, of history, he deals with the question, which is very important today—and I would say very important to the world of the last maybe 100 years—of Russia as a post-imperial state. Russia is going through post-imperial struggles, something that maybe other countries and nations that had empires went through before. Other countries went through transformations in the 1960s with social upheavals. Russia is only now trying to make sense out of what happened in the last 30 to 50 years, with the loss of empire, the loss of messianic ideology. Sergei remains optimistic, but his diagnosis is not great in the sense that Russia, at this point, doesn’t have a clear sense of itself or a clear vision for the future. It’s stuck in the past and visions of a grandiose Soviet or imperial past, which is one of the factors that pushes it toward all this adventurism and expansion and a lot of blood in the Russian neighbourhood, but also outside of the post-Soviet space.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize
Serhii Plokhy ,
Historian
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