Classics

It was conceived as a parody. Cervantes ridiculed the chivalric novels that Spain was obsessed with, and came up with an elderly nobleman who, from reading them, had become…

Austen wrote about what she knew: several families in a village, visits, balls, conversations over tea — and marriage as the only means available to women for…

A medical experiment as a political satire. Professor Preobrazhensky, a luminary and a gentleman of the old school, transplants a human pituitary gland into a homeless dog, and…

Wilde's only novel — and, in essence, a frightening tale of a contract that no one signed. A young man of rare beauty poses for an artist, and…

A short novel in which almost nothing happens, yet it is remembered in its entirety. The narrator, Nick Carraway, rents a small house next to Gatsby's mansion, and…

The main thing about this book is its voice. A teenager, Holden Caulfield, who has been expelled from another school, wanders around New York for several days and tells…

A novella that proved it's possible to write something great using almost no words. An old Cuban fisherman, Santiago, who hasn't had a catch in a long time, goes out to sea alone, and…

Six generations of the Buendía family, the town of Macondo, which grew up in the swamps, and time, which behaves differently here: names repeat, and…

The narrator is an eight-year-old girl, and this decision defines the entire book. Scout lives in a sleepy Alabama town in the 1930s, where adults are polite, but…

Flaubert brought prose to a state where every word is in its place and cannot be replaced — he spent weeks searching for the right phrase and rewriting …

Tolstoy refused to call it a novel, and he was right: the conventional form doesn't fit here. Four volumes, a decade and a half, war with Napoleon…

A novel commonly considered a book about love, but it's about society. Tolstoy develops two storylines with almost no intersection: Anna, destroying her life…

Dostoevsky's last book and his final argument with himself. There is a father—an old man for whom life has left only greed, and there are three…

Dostoevsky set himself an almost impossible task: to depict a positively beautiful man—and to see what ordinary life will do to him…

Pushkin called it a novel in verse and emphasized that the difference is devilish. And so it is: the plot can be retold in five phrases—a bored nobleman…

Gogol called the book a poem, and this is not coquetry: the prose here sounds, accelerates, breaks into lyrical digressions and returns to business. But…

A book that gave the Russian language the word "nihilist" in its common meaning. Young Bazarov arrives to stay at an estate with a friend and…

A novel assembled from novellas, where the order of chapters deliberately doesn't match the order of events—a technique that European prose wouldn't reach for many…

Три книги в одной обложке, и швы между ними — главный фокус Булгакова. В Москву тридцатых приезжает дьявол со свитой и устраивает городу про…

Достоевский начинает не с загадки, а с ответа: мы знаем, кто и как, почти сразу. Весь роман — про то, что бывает с человеком дальше. Бывший …