European Classics – serie

Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves.

A classic of socialist realism, Cement became a model for Soviet fiction in the decades following its publication in the early 1920s. Gleb, a soldier hero, returns from the revolution to a world in transition, as demonstrated by the reorganization of the local cement factory for the massive national effort. His wife, Dasha, is now a leader of the Women's Section of the Communist Pary, an activist in a society where women are suddenly men's equals. Gleb finds that he cannot easily pick up the threads of their old relationship or adjust to this new social order.

Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war peacefully tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters. Vladimir Voinovich's hilarious satire ridicules everything that was sacred in the Soviet Union, from agricultural reform to the Red Army to Stalin, in a refreshing combination of dissident conscience and universal humour.

Widely regarded as a major writer of his generation, Yuri Trifonov tolerated attack and admiration in the Soviet Union. His novellas are celebrated as being in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. In Another Life, a woman suddenly widowed attempts to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband, and to understand their life together. The House on the Embankment is the story of an academic opportunist who rises to apparatchik but suffers the oppression of society, friends, and most of all his inability to make decisions.

The novel A Brief Excursion anchors this collection of fiction by one of the most significant postwar Croatian writers. This novel and six stories, including many from Soljan's first book, Traitors, reveal a sensibility both comic and poignant, devoted to questions of identity and solidarity, of how the one and the many conflict and intermingle-issues that were at the center of both political and literary life for Soljan. Whether fixing up a summerhouse on the Istrian coast or confronting prejudice and the past in a tourist town, Soljan's characters are stirred to action by an undefined longing, only to find the stark landscape of self-knowledge and loss.

A collection of stories by Leo Tolstoy, in which he draws on the tragic past of Russia to comment on the issues and ideas of his day. The stories show the depth of - and contradictions in - his thought as he tried to reconcile his religious beliefs with humanistic appeals for justice.

Yuri Trifonov, now recognized as one of the most distinguished Russian writers of the twentieth century, took a turn toward the controversial - and a leap toward greatness - with the publication of the novellas included in this collection. Two parts of the Moscow trilogy that established Trifonov's reputation, ""The Exchange"" and ""The Long Goodbye,"" are remarkable for their depiction of the complex dilemmas and compromises of Russian life after the Second World War. These works, along with the two short stories included in this volume, detail the moral and spiritual decline in Russia that resulted from the growing distance between the theoretical idealism of the Soviet state and the actual materialism and careerism that increasingly marked Russian society. While immersing readers in the social milieus of his characters and in the specifics of their existence, Trifonov is concerned with finding and examining the precise moment when a man or woman takes a wrong turn in life, the moment of moral betrayal. Trifonov brings the clashes between different generations, cultural backgrounds, ideals, and realities to nuanced, disturbing, and memorable life.