Sing to the Motherland:
A selection of novels about Russia

B. Akunin
The Winter Queen. RH, 2003.
In Czarist Russia, when a student from a wealthy family shoots himself, Erast Fandorin of the Moscow Police investigates the supposedly open-and-shut case and discovers that the student's suicide is not an isolated case.

Nina Berberova
The Accompanist. Atheneum, 1988.
Sonechka, a talented but otherwise ordinary pianist, seems doomed to live in the shadow of the beautiful singer who employs her, and decides to betray her.

Ladies from St. Petersburg. New Directions, 1998.
Three novellas which chronologically depict the lives of people whose lives have been forever changed by the Russian revolution.

Billancourt tales. New Directions, 2001
A collection of short stories about life in a Paris suburb settled by Russian emigres during the 1930s.

Natasha Borovsky
A Daughter of the Nobility. HRW, 1985
As Russia changes forever in the aftermath of WWI and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Tatyana Silmirskaya struggles on a more personal level to reconcile both her ambitions to become a doctor and the love she feels for her cousin with the expectations of her father, a trusted advisor to the Tsar.

Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita. H&R, 1967.
When the Devil wrecks havoc in 1920s Moscow, only the Master, a writer dedicated to the search for the truth, and Margarita, who walks through hell for him, stand firm to defeat his power. A satirical look at the absurdities of life in Communist Russia.

Jerome Charyn
The Green Lantern. Thunders Mouth, 2004.
Ivan Azerbaijan, known as Ivanushka, a poor boy from the mountains, arrives in with a traveling theater troupe Moscow to help build sets for a new production of King Lear. Instead, an act of fate the makes the 6'6" "actor" thye toast of the town when he is thrust into the role of lead role. He comes to the attention of Joseph Stalin, who allows disgraced starlet Valentina Michaelson (she has been under house arrest as punishment for daring to make a film for MGM) to join the cast as Cordelia. As Ivanushka falls in love with his leading lady, he is thrust headlong into the world of intrigue and distrust.

Anton Chekhov
Chekhov is one of the great masters of the short story. Below is a selection of short story collections at the Sachem Library:

Stories of Men.
Chekhov, the Early Stories, 1883–1888. Macmillan, 1982.
The Crooked Mirror & Other Stories. Zebra, 1992.
A Doctor’s Visit: Short Stories. Bantam, 1988.
The Image of Chekhov: Forty Stories in the Order in Which They Were Written. Knopf, 1963.
The Shooting Party. Univ. of Chicago, 1987.
The Sinner from Toledo & Other Stories. Farleigh Dickinson Univ., 1972.

C. J. Cherryh
Rusalka. Ballantine, 1989.
In this series drawn from Russian folklore, Pyetr and Sasha's flight to Kiev is interrupted when they stumble upon a wizard intent on bringing the spirit of his murdered daughter back to life. Followed by: Chernevog (1990) and Yvgenie (1991).

J. M. Coetzee
The Master of Petersburg. Viking, 1994
After his stepson falls to his death, author Fydor Dostoevesky comes to learn that he may have been killed by a revolutionary group. His painful discoveries will form the impetus for his not-yet-written The Brothers Karamazov.

Nikolai Dezhnev
In Concert Performance. Talese/Doubleday, 1999
Luka, a fallen angel, is sent back to earth to atone for his past, but his penance is jeopardized when he falls madly in love with Anna, the wife of a physicist.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot. 1869.
Extortion, scandal & murder result when Prince Myshkin, a moral & saintly man, finds himself in the center of a violent love triangle.

The Brothers Karamazov.
The story of a patricide, jealousy, hatred, and the four brothers who each have a motive for murder.

Demons. Knopf, 1994, 1897.
Relates the story of the murder of Ivan Ivanov by his fellow revolutionaries and the ensuing trial of the perpertrators.

Helen Dunmore
The Siege. Grove, 2001
In 1941, amidst the misery of the German siege of Leningrad, Anna Levin finds love for the first time.

John Elliott
Blood on the Snow. St. Martin's, 1977
Lives change dramatically after the 1905 Bloody Sunday slaughter.

Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls. Modern Library, 1997, 1842.
Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant, sets out to make his fortune by buying “souls”–the dead serfs of landowners (who are required to pay taxes on them until a new census removes them from the tax rolls), then selling them for profit.

Paul Greenberg
Leaving Katya. Putnam’s Sons, 2002.
While studying in Leningrad, Daniel falls in love (he thinks) with Katya. Later, as the Soviet Union crumbles, Katya shows up at his NY home. They marry, but Daniel’s “Russian Phase” has run its course.

Emily Hanlon
Petersburg. Putnam’s Sons, 1988.
Passion and [ ] sweep four people into a world of betrayal and rebellion during the turbulent years of Russia’s last Tsar in the country’s most glittering city.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
The Kirov Saga: Anna
Things look bleak for Anne Peters when she is stranded in Paris until a Russian diplomat named Kirov offers her a job as governess to his children. Anne, quickly dubbed Anna, is soon swept up into a foreign and exotic world filled with passion and intrigue. Followed by: Fleur and Emily.

Travis Holland
The Archivist's Story. Dial, 2007
In 1939 Moscow, a young archivist is sent to Lubyanka prison to authenticate (and the destroy) an unsigned story confiscated from a political prisoner, writer Isaac Babel. Instead, the archivist resolves to save the author's final works.

Donald James
Monstrum. Villard, 1997
In 2015 Moscow, following a bloody civil war, newly arrived police inspector Constantin Vadim is assigned to investigate a series of mutilation slayings of young women. At the same time, his ex-wife-- an anarchist general on the war's losing side now on the run--seeks his help to escape the country.

Nadezhda Khvoschinskaya
The Boarding School Girl. Northwestern University Press, 2000, 1861
The life of a provincial schoolgirl is influenced by her neighbor--an unhappy, exiled poet.

Mercedes Lackey
Firebird. TOR, 1996.
Cast out from his home by seven jealous brother, young Ilya stumbles onto an enchanted castle, distressed damsels, a garden of questing princes turned to stone, and the secret of the shapeshifting woman called the Firebird.

Konstantin Leontiev
The Egyptian Dove. Weybright & Talley, 1969, 1881.
In the 19th century Balkans, a Russian diplomat falls in love with the wife of a wealthy Greek merchant.

Mikahil Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time. Heron, 1969, 1840.
The story of Grigory Pechorin, a disillusioned aristicrat living in the Russian Caucausus in the 19th century.

Andrei Makine
Dreams of My Russian Summer. Arcade, 1997.
Andrei recalls both his summer visits with his mysterious grandmother, who enchants him with magical tales of another time and world, and his difficulty reconciling the two contradictory and incompatible worlds that Charlotte's life has spanned.

Requiem for a Lost Empire. Arcade Pub., 2001, 2000
Three generations of a Russian family...

Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer. Acrade, 2000
During the post WWI years of hardship and repression, two families try to piece together their shattered lives.

Alexei Malashenko
The Last Red August. Scribner, 1993.
A Committee member fearful of losing his place and perks in the "New Russia," plots the overthrow of Gorbachev and endangers the life of his son in the process.

Vladimir Nabokov
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.
69 stories, including 13 first-time translations by Dmitri Nabokov, exploring the author's recurring themes of political satire, human relations, and loss.

Jay Parini
The Last Station. Holt, 1990.
During his last year, Tolstoy's does battle with his wife as well as his philosophical dilemma over how his privileged life stands in opposition of his professed virtues of chastity and poverty.

Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago. 1957
Tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family. Dr. Yury Zhivago is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary.

Viktor Pelevin
Buddah’s Little Finger. Viking, 2000, 1999.
In revolutionary Russia of 1919, poet Pyotr Voyd becomes a commissar in the Red Army. In the present, he's a patient in a mental ward outside Moscow for persistent delusions that he's a poet whose military strategy saved the Red Army at the Battle of Lozovaya Junction. His doctors come to the conclusion that his severe personality disorder has been brought on by his inability to accept the new Russia with its new economy and way of life

Judith Pella & Michael R. Phillips
"The Russians"

This series, set against the vast backdrop of pre-Revolutionary Russia, follows the lives of two families of two faiths, one rich, one poor.

The Crown & the Crucible. 1991.
A House Divided. 1992.
Travail & Triumph. 1992.
Heirs of the Motherland. 1993.
The Dawning of Deliverance. 1995.
White Nights, Red Morning. Bethany, 1996
Passage into Light. Bethany, 1998

Evgeni Petrov
Twelve Chairs.
When a former aristocrat who is now a Russian clerk under the new Soviet regime learns that his dying mother in law sewed a fortune of family jewels into one of twelve dining room chairs, he sets off across Russia to find it with an opportunist, a priest and his former servant all in pursuit.

Prince Michael of Greece
The White Night of St. Petersburg.Atlantic Monthly, 2004.
A fictionalalized account of Grand Duke Nicholas Kostantinovich (the author's great uncle), who grew up in 19th-century Russia, and was cousin to the future doomed Tsar Alexander, from stories revelaed to him by Nicholas' grand-daughter, Natalya Androssov Iskander Romanov.

Aleksandr Puskin
The Captain’s Daughter. Bradda, 1969, 1836.
Tells the story of a peasant’s insurrection led by Pougachev.

Edward Rutherford
Russka: The Novel of Russia. Crown, 1991.
In this epic story, the lives of families inhabiting a small Ukrainian village are chronicled through the centuries from AD 180 to the Russian Revolution.

Fred Saberhagen
Dancing Bears. TOR, 1996.
American John Sherwood accompanies his friend Gregori Lohmatski to his ancestral estate to hunt a man-eating bear, only to learn that the peasants' stories of men turning into bears are true.

Ingo Schultze
33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories. Knopf, 1998, 1995.
From the enchanting to the bizarre, these stories capture the details of everyday life in contemporary St. Petersburg.

Paullina Simons
The Bronze Horseman. Morrow, 2001
During the siege of Leningrad, young Tatiana Metanov finds herself drawn into an impossible love with a Red Army soldier with a dangerous secret in his past.

Martin Cruz Smith
Gorky Park. RH, 1981.
In contemporary Moscow, disgruntled Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko unravels the mystery of a triple murder complicated by the shadowy and uncooperative presence of the KGB and by his falling in love. Followed by: Polar Star (1989), Red Square (1992) & Havana Bay (1999).


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
August 1914. FSG, [ ]
The outbreak of the first World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into Prussia sees the last vestiges of Imperial Russia are stamped out by the Bolsheveks. Followed by November, 1916.

Cancer Ward. FSG, 1994
The harrowing and pain-filled lives of Kostoglotov & his fellow inmates confined in a poor ward for terminally-ill cancer patients provides a microcosm of the Soviet system.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Bantam, 1990, 1962.
A stark depiction of a grueling day in a Siberian labor camp.

Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina.
The sensuous Anna rejects her passionless marriage to Aleksey Karenin and enters into an adulterous affair with the dashing Count Vronksy, with tragic results.

War and Peace. 1886.
Epic tale depicting the lives, loves, and sorrows of five aristocratic families during the war against Napoleon.

Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons. 1872.
When Arkady Kirasanov returns home from college, he brings his revolutionary friend, Bazarov. But Bazarov brings with him new and cataclysmic views of political philosophy.

Ludmila Ulitskaya
The Funeral Party. Schocken Books, 1999
In 1991, as the Soviet Union teeters on the verge of extinction, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of Alik, a charismatic artist beloved by them all.

Vladimir Voinovich
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. FSG, 1977
At the commencement of World War II, a private in the Red Army encounters Stalin's military institutions.

Robin White
Siberian Light. Delacorte, 1997.
Gregori Nowek, mayor of Morkovo, Siberia, sets out to solve a string of murders and finds a link to the trafficking of rare Siberian tigers.

The Ice Curtain. Delacorte, 2002.
While investigating the loss of millions of dollars worth of rough diamonds, Gregori Nowek finds himself working the case alone when his boss is murdered. Not only must he track down the killers, he has only two weeks to recover the lost gemstones, which are needed as collateral for a loan from the IMF.

Jack Womack
Let’s Put the Future Behind Us. Atlantic Monthly, 1996.
In the “new” Russia, where Capitalism reigns supreme, ex-bureaucrat Max Borodin, whose new career involves the fabrication of phony documents, gets more than he bargained for when he enters into a shady business deal that endangers his life, his wife, his mistress, and his business, not necessarily in that order.

Created and maintained by: Lynne M. Kennedy.

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