Reading list
The great Russian novels, and where to start
Russian novels have a reputation for length and gloom. Both are earned, but the reputation leaves out how funny Gogol is, and how many of the best Russian books are short enough to finish on a weekend.
18 books, all free to read
So the list starts small and works up. The reading path in the app does the same in eight steps; this is the longer version, with the books we would add.
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1. Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A student kills a pawnbroker to prove a theory and spends the book finding out what he actually is. A thriller first, which is why it works.
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2. Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The greatest novel about a marriage, or two marriages, and the best first sentence in Russian.
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3. The Brothers Karamazov with The Grand Inquisitor
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Three brothers, a murdered father and every argument about God. Dostoevsky's last book and the summit.
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4. War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Napoleon invades, families rise and fall, and somehow it is about how to live. Long, but in short scenes, which suits a feed.
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5. Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A spiteful clerk talks to you from under the floorboards. The first anti-hero, and short enough for a weekend.
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6. Short Fiction with The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's shorter fiction, with the novella about a judge who discovers, while dying, that he never lived.
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7. Short Fiction with The Overcoat and The Nose
by Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's stories: a clerk's new coat, a nose that leaves its owner. Dostoevsky said they all came out from under that overcoat.
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8. Short Fiction with The Lady with the Dog
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov invented the modern short story by leaving things out. Read three and you will see it everywhere.
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9. Fathers and Children
by Ivan Turgenev
A young nihilist comes home from university and quarrels with everyone. The generation-gap novel that named the generation gap.
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10. Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
A con man buys dead serfs. Gogol's comic road novel about a country that runs on paperwork.
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11. The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky tries to write a perfectly good man and drops him into St Petersburg society. It does not go well.
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12. Eugene Onegin
by Alexander Pushkin
Pushkin's novel in verse, the book every Russian quotes. A bored dandy, a girl who writes him a letter, a duel.
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13. Demons
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A provincial town and a cell of revolutionaries. Dostoevsky's dark, prophetic political novel.
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14. We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Written in 1921, banned at home, and the book Orwell read before Nineteen Eighty-Four. The first great dystopia.
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15. Resurrection
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's last novel: a prince on a jury recognises the woman he ruined, and follows her to Siberia.
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16. Poor Folk
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's first book, a novel in letters between two poor neighbours. Short and tender, and where it began.
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17. The Gambler
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Written in under a month to beat a publisher's deadline, about a gambler. Dostoevsky at his fastest.
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18. The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
An estate is sold to pay debts while the family talks about anything else. Chekhov's last play, and he called it a comedy.
Read it as a path: Russian classics
From Gogol's overcoat to the Karamazovs, short works first so the long ones feel earned.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.