The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (Penguin Classics)

Indispensable. If you have use for samizdat, great writing, or all those tales of Russia you'd love to read again, Buy this book. Typically I don't like these portable readers, especially when it comes to tying many authors, styles, and works together, but this one feels like the only chance you'll have at reading so many brilliant voices. The writers and their stories are just heartbreaking. Olesha's Envy alone is enough to bring anyone to tears.

I used this collection for a class in Russian Fiction. Generally it is a fine collection of decent translations, but you could wish for more. It should be noted, a good deal of these texts can be found online, for free. But, for the interested beginner in Russian Literature, this will keep you busy, though I prefer earlier Russian Lit personally.

Enjoyed every one of these selections.

This book has so much in it, its wonderful! we used it all semester long and I really enjoyed a lot of it!

I took a survey course in Russsian literature back in 2001 and I appreciated this most of all the books we used. The reason is that for many of us starting out in Russian literature, the 20th century contains many more authors and works than the 19th that we hadn't heard of and didn't know exist. And sure enough even some of the more obscure and shorter works of, for example, Klebnikov, Sinyavsky, Blok or Zoshchenko turn out to be vibrant, well written, highly relevant and highly original. In short this is a great resource for discovering Russian literature and also turns out to be a good way to get ahold of some pieces that aren't all that easy to find.

I bought this book for a course in Russian short fiction, and two years later I still find myself coming back to it. There are many great examples of Soviet and pre-Soviet writing in this anthology, the complete text of Olesha's novella "Envy", as well as some excerpts from longer works like "The Master and Margarita" and "Dr. Zhivago". True to the Russian literary tradition, most of the pieces occupy a bizarre liminal space between incredibly funny and incredibly disturbing. The author I'm most grateful for having been introduced to through this volume is Danill Kharms, an absurdist writer from the early Soviet era. His "Anecdotes about Pushkin's Life" mocks the kind of hero worship prevelant in the literary world by presenting a series of ridiculous one-paragraph stories that make little to no sense, but are quite funny. Other highlights in this book include Zamayatin's (authour of "We") "The Cave", Babel's "My First Goose", Platonov's "The Potudan River", Zoshchenko's bureaucratic allegory "Bees and People", Gorky's "Recollections of Leo Tolstoy", and Shalamov's Gulag horror story "Lend Lease". This book is well worth getting, and you'll find yourself returning to it over and over again, each time finding something new.

Reader, buy this book! A compilation of pieces from some of the best authors in Russian in the 20th century- there's Tolstoy, Checkov, Mandelstam, Blok, Zamyatin, Pasternak - a veritable constellation of literary greats. If you've read any Tolstoy at all, you will enjoy Gorky's description of the time he met the devilish old man. Zamyatin's 'the Cave' is a particularly heart-wrenching story of the deprivation under communism. I doubt you can put this book down and not at least idly fantasise about learning Russian in order to read all these in the original.

Great compendium of 20th century Russian authors. A lot of social realism, not everyone’s bag. Promotes the USSR as a viable alternative to western style capitalism. That question has largely been settled so I won’t comment one way or another. Many of the stories take place during WW2 and are gripping accounts of the dark days of 1941 - 43, so if you like war stories, with the Red Army glorified, then you might enjoy reading. IMO one of the best stories is about a pack of dogs, told from the dogs point of view. It’s highly imaginative and shows without a doubt that Russian literature, shorn of ideology, is FAR superior to literature written in any other language.

I had to read this for school but it was really interesting. It's a wonderful sampling of great Russian authors.

Great read. Very well translated.