Curated playlist
Russian male novelists
- Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky stood in Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg on the 23rd of December 1849, waiting to be shot. He had been split into a three-man group with the firing squad before him, the third man in the second row. Beside him stood…
- Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904 at the age of forty-four -- the same disease that had killed his brother claiming…
- Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life on a train, preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers, before pneumonia stopped him at a small railway station. He was born Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1828, into old…
- Nikolai GogolNikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once described a planned masterpiece as a Russian answer to Dante's Divine Comedy. He never finished it. On the night of the 24th of February 1852, he burned the manuscript that held most of the second part of…
- Bulat OkudzhavaBulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on the 9th of May 1924, into a family that had traveled from Tbilisi to serve the Communist Party. His father held high rank. His uncle had tried to assassinate a governor. A cousin of sorts rode the…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those heavens from a cell in the Lubyanka prison. He had been arrested three months earlier,…
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a mathematician regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His…
- Fyodor RostopchinFyodor Rostopchin left Moscow on the 14th of September 1812 after ordering his own house burned to the ground. He left behind disassembled fire engines, fuses planted throughout the city, and a small detachment of police charged with…
- Alexander PushkinAlexander Sergeyevich Pushkin could not speak Russian well until he was ten years old. The boy who would become the father of Russian literature grew up speaking mostly French, picking up his native tongue from household serfs and a…
- Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938, he described 327 manuscript pages, roughly 22 chapters, waiting on his desk. He…
- Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a…
- Nikolai LeskovNikolai Semyonovich Leskov died on the 5th of March 1895, and his funeral was held in silence. He had written the instruction into his will in December 1892: no speeches over his body. "I know I have many bad things in me and do not…
- Victor PelevinVictor Pelevin was born in Moscow on the 22nd of November 1962, the son of an English teacher and a military department instructor at Bauman University. He grew up on Tverskoy Boulevard, graduated from an elite high school with a special…
- Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own country for decades. He had been an Old Bolshevik, a trained naval engineer, a man who…
- Mikhail Saltykov-ShchedrinMikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin was the kind of writer whose very name became a language. By the end of his life, critics spoke of a prose style so distinctive they called it 'saltykovian.' A man who spent decades as a government official, who…
- Vladimir SorokinVladimir Sorokin was born on the 7th of August 1955 in Bykovo, a district of Moscow Oblast, and he went on to become one of the most provocative literary voices in contemporary Russian writing. He trained not as a writer but as an…