A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it.

A collection of short stories by the popular and influential Russian author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and arguably the greatest Russian literary figure of the 20th century. He wrote stories, plays, memoirs and novels which touched the imagination of the Russian people, and was the first Russian author to write sympathetically of such characters as tramps and thieves, emphasizing their daily struggles against overwhelming odds.

1905, anonymous translator. A meditation, or prose-poem, on the march of human progress, probably written as a response to the failed Russian revolution of 1905.

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868–1936), primarily known as Maxim (or Maksim) Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl, The Song of the Stormy Petrel, The Mother, Summerfolk and Children of the Sun. He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later write his memoirs on both of them.Gorky was active with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he...

I didn't read your books. I licked them, I rubbed them all over my naked body and licked them. Protasov, detached and idealistic, wants only to immerse himself in chemical experiments to perfect mankind. He's more or less oblivious to the voracious advances of the half-crazed widow Melaniya and his best friend's unrelenting pursuit of his wife, let alone the cholera epidemic and the starving mob at his gates. While Nanny fusses round, Protasov's admiring circle, variously skeptical, romantic and lovesick, spar over culture and the cosmos. Only Liza, neurotic and patronized, feels the suffering of the peasantry and senses that their own privileged world is in jeopardy.** Gone? They're everywhere. Have you heard about the riots? The starvation and the flagrant disregard of authority. This disregard is building walls and barriers between us all. And they are massing. The crowds of angry people. And the hate... the hate between us all... kills everything. Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky's darkly comic Children of the Sun depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but likeable, as they flounder around, philosophizing, yearning, or scuttling between test tubes, blind to their impending annihilation. This is Andrew Upton's fourth English version of a play for the National by one of the great Russian masters, including his acclaimed adaptation of Gorky's Philistines.

Includes the title story, in which a thieving vagrant takes on a young apprentice; "Twenty-six Men and A Girl," in which wretched bakery workers destroy their only source of joy; and "Makar Chudra."

CONFRONTING Life, two people stood -- both discontent. And to the question, "What do you expect of me?" one made answer with weary voice: "I am distracted by the cruelty of thy contradictions. Feebly my reason strives to understand the meaning of existence, and with perplexing gloom my heart is filled before thee. My consciousness doth tell me man is the highest of creations."

Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, Soviet novelist, playwright and essayist, who was a founder of social realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. The Mother, one of his best-known works, is the story of the radicalization of an uneducated woman that was later taken as a model for the Socialist Realist novel, and his autobiographical masterpiece Childhood.

fiction; prose, Literature in Translation

"A book of the utmost importance", in the words of Lenin, and a landmark in Russian literature, The Mother - here presented in a brilliant new version by Hugh Aplin, the first English translation in almost a century - will enchant modern readers both for its historical significance and its intrinsic value as a work of art. Inspired by real events and centring on the figure of Pelageya Vlasova - the "mother" of the title - and her son Pavel, Gorky's masterpiece describes the brutal life of ordinary Russian factory workers in the years leading to the 1905 Revolution and explores the rise of the proletariat, the role of women in society and the lower classes' struggle for self-affirmation. "A book of the utmost importance", in the words of Lenin, and a landmark in Russian literature, The Mother - here presented in a brilliant new version by Hugh Aplin, the first English translation in almost a century - will enchant modern readers both for its historical significance and its...