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Semyon Ardalyonovitch said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday: “Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivanovitch? Tell me that, pray.” A strange requirement. I did not resent it, I am a timid man; but here they have actually made me out mad. An artist painted my portrait as it happened: […]
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Arkady Timofeevich Averchenko (1881–1925) was a prominent Russian playwright and satirist. He showcased his literary prowess by contributing stories to the renowned journal Satirikon, where he not only served as a contributor but also held the position of an editor. Additionally, his works graced the pages of the series New Satirikon and various other publications. […]
Zinaida Gippius (1869 – 1945) was a Russian poet, novelist, playwright, editor and religious thinker, one of the central figures in Russian symbolism.
“Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction,” laughed Ivan. “Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age—as you must have been told at school—when it was the great fashion among poets to make the denizens and powers of higher worlds descend on […]
So I was alone, surrounded by November gloom and whirling snow; the house was smothered in it and there was a moaning in the chimneys. I had spent all twenty-four years of my life in a huge city and thought that blizzards only howled in novels. It appeared that they- howled in real life. The […]
IT was noon of a bright winter’s day. The air was crisp with frost, and Nadia, who was walking beside me, found her curls and the delicate down on her upper lip silvered with her own breath. We stood at the summit of a high hill. The ground fell away at our feet in a […]
At nine o’clock one morning in June, Captain Popov rang the doorbell. No one answered for a long time, but finally he heard the sound of scurrying. “Who’s there? Who is it?” a plaintive female voice said. The door opened a crack, the chain left on. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko shifted their weight, itching to start, […]
Lyudmila Ulitskaya is a modern Russian novelist and short-story writer who, in 2014, was awarded the prestigious Austrian State Prize for European Literature for her oeuvre. Ulitskaya herself belongs to a group of people formed by the realities of the former Soviet Union, who see themselves racially and culturally as Jews, while having adopted Christianity […]
Here once lived a girl who was beloved by her mother but no one else. The girl was used to it and didn’t get too upset. Her name was Oksana – a glamorous, fashionable name — but our heroine wished for something plainer: Tanya or Lena or even Xenia. She was a serious-minded young lady, […]
It was an immense city in which they lived: Petrov, clerk in a commercial bank, and he, the other,—name unknown. They used to meet once a year, at Easter, when they both went to pay a visit at one and the same house, that of the Vasilyevskys. Petrov used to pay a visit also at […]
The musician Bowzinsky was walking from town to the country house of Prince Bibulov, where an evening of music and dance was to “take place,” as they say, for an engagement party. On his back was an enormous double bass in a leather case. Bowzinsky walked along a river where cool water flowed — not […]
Our friends the Zaitsevs live out of town “The air is so much better out in the suburbs,” they say. That is, they can’t afford to live where the air is bad. A small group of us went to visit them. We set off without any mishap. That is, apart from minor details: we didn’t […]
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