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About The Russian Short Story - Volume 6: Alexander Kuprin to Isaac Babel

The Russian novel has a reputation that is immense, both in narrative and in length. Unquestionably though the ideas, themes and characters make many novels rightly revered as world class, as icons of literature. Perhaps an easier way to enjoy a wider selection of the Russian heritage, with its varied and glorious literary talents, is with the short story. These gems sparkle and beguile the mind with their characters and narrative, exploring facets of society and the human condition that more Western authors somehow find more difficult to navigate, or to explore, explain and relate to. The Russian short story is, in many respects, in a genre of its own. It is at its captivating best whether it’s an exploration of real-life experiences, through fantasy and fables and on to total absurdity. In a land so vast it is unsurprising that it is a world almost unto itself. Cultures and landscapes of differing hues are packed together bound only by the wilful bonds and force of Empire. The stories in this collection traverse the decades where one might be a serf under an absolute monarch, and the reality of that was pretty near to slavery, into an emancipation of sorts in the fields, or towns under the despotic will of landowners and the rich into the upheavals of Empire and then the overthrow of the ruling class and its replacement by the communists, who promised equality for all and delivered a society where the down-trodden remained the lowest yet vital cog of the state machine and its will. Whilst Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov are a given in any Russian collection we also explore and include Andreyev, Korolenko, Turgenev, Blavatsky and many others to create a world rich and dense across a sprawling landscape of diverse people, riddled with the class and unfairness in perhaps some of the most turbulent times that Russia has ever experienced. 01 - The Russian Short Story - Volume 6 - An Introduction 02 - Cain by Alexander Kuprin 03 - Anathema by Alexander Kuprin 04 - An Evening Guest by Alexander Kuprin 05 - Silence by Leonid Andreyev 06 - Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev 07 - The Lie by Leonid Andreyev 08 - The City by Leonid Andreyev 09 - The Republic of the Southern Cross by Valery Bryusov 10 - The Revolutionist by Mikhail Petrovich Artzybashev 11 - Light by Achmed Abdullah 12 - Morphine by Mikhail Bulgakov 13 - The Murderer by Mikhail Bulgakov 14 - The Blind Ones by Isaac Babel