Classic 19th-century Russian literature

In less than fifty years Russia produced a series of novels asking questions nobody had put in that form: a student kills an old pawnbroker to find out whether he is a superior man, a married woman leaves everything for love and faces a society that does not forgive, a landowner buys the names of dead peasants, another stays in bed for three hundred pages. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky dominate, but Gogol invented the Russian grotesque, Turgenev nuance, Leskov the language of storytellers. The country debated its future in these books.

works 7

• NovelDead SoulsМёртвые душиNikolai Gogol · 1842A novel of 1842 that the author called a poem, the journey of a buyer of dead serfs through a Russian province.Literature
• NovelOblomovОбломовIvan Goncharov · 1859A novel published in 1859, a portrait of a landowner who cannot bring himself to leave his divan.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeFirst LoveПервая любовьIvan Turgenev · 1860A narrative of 1860 about an adolescent in love with his neighbours' daughter, one summer in the country.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeLady Macbeth of the Mtsensk DistrictЛеди Макбет Мценского уездаNikolai Leskov · 1865A tale of 1865 about the passion of a young merchant's wife, in a small town in the Oryol region.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelCrime and PunishmentПреступление и наказаниеFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866A novel of 1866: a poor student in Saint Petersburg kills a pawnbroker to test a theory, and has to live with his act.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelAnna KareninaАнна КаренинаLeo Tolstoy · 1878A novel in eight parts, published in a magazine in instalments, then in volume form in 1878: Anna's passion and, in counterpoint, a landowner's quest.LiteraturePublic domain
• CinemaAnna KareninaАнна КаренинаAlexander Zarkhi · 1967A colour adaptation, in 1967, of Tolstoy's novel, with Tatiana Samoilova in the role of Anna.Cinema