This list of novels and novellas will help you explore Russia’s vast landscapes and complex history

I spent several years wandering round Russia with books in my rucksack. And several more years reviewing Russian fiction and finding myself transported back, whether to a village with chickens pecking through orchards round a wooden church or to a drunken kitchen table debate in a high-rise overlooking the Moscow suburbs. This subjective list of engaging, relatively readable novels and novellas recreates various Russian landscapes, eras and atmospheres, often in ways that no amount of travelling could. As Ludmila Ulitskaya writes in The Big Green Tent: “Military historians have found many discrepancies in Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino, but the whole world imagines the...

This list of novels and novellas will help you explore Russia’s vast landscapes and complex history

I spent several years wandering round Russia with books in my rucksack. And several more years reviewing Russian fiction and finding myself transported back, whether to a village with chickens pecking through orchards round a wooden church or to a drunken kitchen table debate in a high-rise overlooking the Moscow suburbs. This subjective list of engaging, relatively readable novels and novellas recreates various Russian landscapes, eras and atmospheres, often in ways that no amount of travelling could. As Ludmila Ulitskaya writes in The Big Green Tent: “Military historians have found many discrepancies in Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino, but the whole world imagines the event just as Tolstoy described it in War and Peace.”...