Here is a List of 10 Best Russian Novels. These Novels are available on Amazon. Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature.
Author : Ludmila Ulitskaya
In a small apartment in New York, in the sweltering mid-summer heat, a group of Russian émigrés gather around the sickbed of an artist named Alik.
Nina, his wife, is desperate for Alik to be baptised; Irina, his ex-lover, a circus acrobat turned lawyer, quietly pays the bills; elderly Maria dispenses magical herbs; and Maika, Irina's fifteen-year-old daughter, prepares to lose the only man to make her laugh.
As the visitors fuss and reminisce over Alik, in a corner of the crowded room the television shows the uprising outside the White House in Moscow and the tanks closing in on the city . . .
Author : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps.
Buy from Amazon
Author : Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war.
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.
Author : Mikhail Sholokhov
'A wonderful, unsparing epic ... an intimate human story of loss and love' New Statesman, Books of the Year The epic novel of love, war and revolution from Mikhail Sholokhov, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature An extraordinary Russian masterpiece, And Quiet Flows the Don follows the turbulent fortunes of the Cossack people through peace, war and revolution - among them the proud and rebellious Gregor Melekhov, who struggles to be with the woman he loves as his country is torn apart. Borne of Mikhail Sholokhov's own early life in the lands of the Cossacks by the river Don, it is a searing portrait of a nation swept up in conflict, with all the tragic choices it brings.
Buy from Amazon
Author : Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confronts the changes cruel experience has made in him and the anguish of being torn between the love of two women.
Buy from Amazon
Author : Maxim Gorky
Mother' Is the immortal classic of maxim Gorky, one of the world's best-loved writers. It is the story of the radicalization of an uneducated woman. From her dull peasant existence into active participation in her people's struggle for justice. Through her work she frees herself from the cowed state into which she has been beaten and her simple motherly concern for her son becomes a motherly concern for all oppressed. The book uses simple style to make it an easy read while slowly adding thicker and thicker layers of propaganda and pro Marxist Communist theory.
Buy from Amazon
Author : Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov is a philosophical novel set in 19th century Russia delving deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer and philosopher whose literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia.
Buy from Amazon
Author : Leo Tolstoy
Hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time and a classic of world literature, War and Peace unfolds in the early nineteenth century during the turbulent years of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Tolstoy's epic ranges from stirring depictions of historical events to intimate portraits of family life, moving between public spectacles and private lives to offer a tale of both panoramic scope and closely observed detail.
From the breathless excitement of 16-year-old Natasha Rostov's first ball, to Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's epiphany on the battlefield at Austerlitz, the novel abounds in memorable incidents, particularly those involving Pierre Bezukhov. A seeker after moral and spiritual truths, Pierre and his search for life's deeper meaning stand at the heart of this monumental book. A tale of strivers in a world fraught with conflict, social and political change, and spiritual confusion, Tolstoy's magnificent work continues to entertain, enlighten, and inspire readers around the world.
Author : Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, a brilliant yet conflicted student lives in a rented room of a run-down apartment in St. Petersburg. Extremely handsome, proud and intelligent, Raskolnikov devises a peculiar theory about “intelligent” men being above law.To execute his theory, he contemplates committing a crime. He murders a cynical and an unscrupulous pawnbroker named Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta.The act compels Raskolnikov to negotiate and reconcile with his own moral dilemmas.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s incisive psychological analysis of his protagonist goes beyond Raskolnikov’s criminal act and covers his perilous journey from suffering to redemption.
Author : Ivan Turgenev
Returning home after years away at university, Arkady is proud to introduce his clever friend Bazarov to his father and uncle. But their guest soon stirs up unrest on the quiet country estate - his outspoken nihilist views and his scathing criticisms of the older men expose the growing distance between Arkady and his father. And when Bazarov visits his own doting but old-fashioned parents, his disdainful rejection of traditional Russian life causes even further distress. In Fathers and Sons, Turgeneve created a beautifully-drawn and highly influential portrayal of the clash between generations, at a time just before the end of serfdom, when the refined yet vanishing landowning class was being overturned by a brash new breed that strove to change the world.
Buy from Amazon