A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up by falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval: Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs...

Accessible to students, tourists, and general listeners alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the...

His final and greatest work, Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published serially in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Set against a modernizing 19th-century Russia, the characters experience moral struggles of faith, judgment, and reason amid a patricidal murder which forms the center of the plot. The novel is full of ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. Dostoyevsky...

Taking advantage of material unavailable until the fall of the Soviet Union, Erickson portrays Alexandra's story as a closely observed, enthrallingly documented, progressive psychological retreat from reality. The lives of the Romanovs were full of color and drama, but the personal life of Alexandra has remained enigmatic. Under Erickson's masterful scrutiny the full dimensions of the Empresses' singular psychology are revealed: her childhood bereavement,...

An international gang war chooses Moscow as its battlefield Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov has adapted well to life without Communism. But under the Soviets, blood feuds were pursued in the dark halls of bureaucracy, and now they take place in the streets. An international drug ring has chosen Moscow as its next port of call, and the only thing standing in its way is the budding Russian mob, headed by a young man whose brutality is matched...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is one of the world's first psychological thrillers. A mesmerizing detective story with an intriguing and multifarious central character, Crime and Punishment hinges on the ethical dilemmas and angst of the student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov who plans and implements the murder of a ruthless pawnbroker. Rodion convinces himself that in killing her he will both solves his financial problems

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In 1913 Russia, twelve-year-old Katya eagerly anticipates leaving her St. Petersburg home, though not her older cousin Misha, to join her mother, a lady in waiting in the household of Tsar Nicholas II, but the ensuing years bring world war, revolutio

Describes the geography, plants and animals, history, economy, language, religion, culture, sports and arts, and people of Russia.

Describes the history, culture, daily life, food, sports, people, and points of interest in Moscow.