Constance Garnett

"Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style - she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations...

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.

Twenty-six-year-old Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to Russia after spending several years at a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by the society of St. Petersburgh for his idiocy, generosity and innocence, he finds himself at the centre of a struggle between a beautiful kept woman and a gorgeous, virtuous girl, both of whom win his affection. Unfortunately, Myshkin's very goodness seems to precipitate disaster, leaving the impression that, in a world...

"In this extraordinary collection of twenty tales, Richard Ford, a master short story writer in his own right, has selected his personal favorites from among more than two hundred of Chekhov's tales and short novels. These stories, ordered chronologically from 1886 to 1899, are drawn from Chekhov's most fruitful years as a short story writer. The translation is by Constance Garnett, who brought Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev to the English-speaking...

Initially banned in his home country The Kingdom of God Is Within You is Leo Tolstoy's great non-fictional work. The zenith of Tolstoy's thirty years of Christian thinking, it sets out a plan for a new society guided by a literal Christian interpretation. Christ conceived of a society based on love, compassion and tolerance, and Tolstoy believed this was incompatible with violence. Tolstoy's response is the principle of nonresistance in

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New Yorker editor and McSweeney's contributor Ben Greenman reshapes Russian literature's most celebrated stories around America's most popular pop culture icons, probing the deep complexities of Anton Chekov (not to mention those of Cruise or Kardashian). Thought-provoking and funny, these wryly re-imagined tales will be sure-fire favorites for every kind of reader, whether your favorite escapes are celebrity memoirs like L.A. Candy and The Truth...