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White Nights
Four nights and one morning in St Petersburg, told by a man who has never spoken properly to a woman. Fifty-eight pages, and the most downloaded book on this site: of more than a thousand titles, this is the one people take.
Collection · Curated by Alice
Must-read Russian classics
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- books to download
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- 1833–1912
- 79 years apart
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Russian literature has a reputation for length that keeps people away from it, and the reputation is earned by about six books. The rest of what these writers did is short: White Nights is fifty-eight pages, The Death of Ivan Ilych is sixty-six, and both do everything the long ones do.
This page is arranged so you can start either way. The first section is the short route in. After it, the writers who made Russian literature before the great novels existed, then Dostoevsky and Tolstoy with a section each, because most people come looking for one of the two.
If you only read one, read White Nights tonight and decide from there.
How this list was built
Everything here was written in Russian by a Russian writer, and everything is in the public domain in the United States. That second rule is why the twentieth century is nearly absent: the best-known Russian books of that period — Doctor Zhivago, The Master and Margarita — are still protected, and they are listed with the year each becomes free rather than quietly left out.
Plays are included where the writer is here for them: Chekhov wrote stories and plays and not much else, and a Chekhov page without Uncle Vanya would be a strange one.
Page counts and reading times are those of the edition served here, not of the work in the abstract: translations vary by hundreds of pages.
Public-domain status is checked against United States copyright terms: works published in 1930 or earlier are already free, and anything later enters the public domain on the first of January after its ninety-fifth year.
Start here
Four books, none of them over 130 pages
The usual advice is to start with Crime and Punishment, which is 557 pages. These four are the same writers doing the same work at a length you can finish this week. All four are among the thirty-five most downloaded books on this site, out of more than a thousand.
The Death of Ivan Ilych
A magistrate falls off a stepladder hanging curtains and spends the rest of the book finding out what his life was worth. Tolstoy wrote it after the crisis he describes in A Confession, further down this page.
Notes from Underground
It begins "I am a sick man… . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." A retired clerk argues with an audience he has invented for the first third, and spends the rest showing you the life that produced the argument.
First Love
A man looks back on the summer he was sixteen and the neighbour he could not stop watching. What ends it is something he was never meant to find out, and Turgenev makes you find it out at the same moment.
Before the great novels
Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol · 1833–1842
In 1830 there was no Russian novel anyone still reads. Within twelve years these five books existed, and everything after them is a reply to something in here. Two are under 160 pages and one is thirteen.
Eugene Onegin
A novel in verse, and the book the rest of this page keeps arguing with. Onegin refuses a girl who writes to him; years later she is married, settled, and it is his turn to be refused.
13 pages
The Queen of Spades
An officer who never gambles hears that an old countess knows three winning cards, and decides he is going to have them. Thirteen pages, and the shortest thing on this page.
A Hero of Our Time
Five linked stories that circle the same officer without ever settling what he is. Pechorin is one of the models for the type Russian criticism calls the superfluous man.
Dead Souls
Chichikov travels the provinces buying serfs who have died but still count as alive on the census. Why anyone would want them is the joke the whole book is built on, and Gogol takes his time telling it.
The Mantle, and Other Stories
Five stories, including The Overcoat, where a clerk saves for a coat and becomes briefly visible to the men he works with. Also the one where an official's nose leaves his face and outranks him.
Dostoevsky
Four novels, 1846 to 1880
He published the first at twenty-four and finished the last a few months before he died. The order matters more than usual here: the arguments in the late books are put in the mouths of characters he had been assembling since his first one.
Poor Folk
His first book, published when he was twenty-four: two poor relatives writing to each other across St Petersburg, mostly about money. It made his name before he had written anything else.
Start here for Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker with a theory in his head about who is permitted to do it, and the rest of the novel is the theory failing. The investigator circles him through three conversations before saying it to his face, and the waiting is the worst of it.
The Idiot
Prince Myshkin is good in a way nobody around him knows how to use, so everyone finds a way to spend him. The kindest character Dostoevsky wrote, and the one he puts through the most.
The Brothers Karamazov
The last novel he completed. A father is murdered, one son is tried for it, and the trial turns into an argument about whether anything at all is forbidden if God is not there.
Tolstoy
Five books, 1869 to 1912
Two enormous novels, then A Confession — the account of the crisis that stopped him writing fiction — and two short works from the other side of it. Read in order, they show a writer taking his own work apart.
1,736 pages
War and Peace
Five families through the Napoleonic invasion, with Napoleon and Kutuzov among them. Tolstoy denied it was a novel at all, and the essays on history he keeps interrupting it with are why.
Anna Karenina
Anna leaves a husband and a son for Vronsky. Running alongside is Levin, working his land and unable to believe in anything, and it is Levin that Tolstoy gives the ending to.
The turning point
A Confession
Written in his early fifties, after Anna Karenina, when he could no longer answer why he should not kill himself. Seventy-nine pages of a man taking his own life apart, and the hinge of everything below.
Master and Man
A merchant and his servant lose the road in a blizzard on the way to close a deal. Fifty-five pages, and the entire book is one decision taken near the end of them.
Hadji Murad
Published two years after his death. An Avar commander changes sides in the Caucasus war and discovers that neither side will finally have him.
The estate, the province, the factory
Three novels about who Russia belonged to, written across fifty years: a landowner who cannot get out of bed, a graduate who brings home a friend who believes in nothing, and a factory worker's mother who ends up delivering the leaflets.
Oblomov
The title character spends the opening chapters trying to get out of bed. A friend and a woman nearly change him, and the book is unusually honest about why they do not.
Fathers and sons
A graduate brings a medical student home for the summer, and the student believes in nothing on purpose. Turgenev's Bazarov put the word nihilist into general use.
Mother
A woman who spent twenty years being beaten finds out what her son does at the factory, and ends up carrying the leaflets herself. Gorky began it in 1906 while raising money in the United States and finished it in Italy.
Chekhov
Stories and plays
He wrote almost no novels and it never mattered. The two plays here run about fifty pages each and the stories run to nearly three thousand — the same writer at both ends, doing the thing where nothing is resolved and everyone means something other than what they say.
2,799 pages
Collection of short stories
Nearly three thousand pages of the stories, in the Garnett, Koteliansky and Long translations. Not a book to read through: open it anywhere and read for twenty minutes.
The Seagull
Its first performance was a failure. Two years later the Moscow Art Theatre staged it again and made its name on it. A boy loves a girl who loves the famous writer who belongs to the boy's mother.
Uncle Vanya
Vanya has spent his life sending the estate's income to a professor he now realises is ordinary. Fifty pages, and nothing is resolved.
Still under copyright
What we cannot offer yet, and the year we can
Three Russian books that belong in any list like this one and are not here. All three are still protected in the United States; the years below are calculated from the date of first publication.
Unlocks January 2053
Doctor Zhivago
Smuggled out and published in Italy first, because it could not be published at home. The Nobel that followed was one Pasternak was forced to decline.
Unlocks January 2058
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
One ordinary day in a labour camp, published in the Soviet Union with Khrushchev's personal approval and out of print again once Khrushchev fell.
Unlocks January 2062
The Master and Margarita
Begun in 1928 and published, censored, more than twenty-five years after Bulgakov died. The uncut text took longer still.