Don Quixote (1605)
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…
Books
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
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…
Heart of a Dog (1987)
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…
The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890)
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…
The Great Gatsby (1925)
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 Catcher in the Rye (1951)
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…
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
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…
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
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…
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
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…
Madame Bovary (1857)
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 …
War and Peace (1869)
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…
Anna Karenina (1877)
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…
The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
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…
The Idiot (1869)
Dostoevsky set himself an almost impossible task: to depict a positively beautiful man—and to see what ordinary life will do to him…
Eugene Onegin (1825)
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…
Dead Souls (1842)
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…
Fathers and Sons (1862)
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 Hero of Our Time (1840)
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…
The Sign of Four (1890)
The second Holmes novella (1890) is noticeably more spirited than the first—here there is already a chase on the night Thames, an Indian backstory with treasures, exotica…
Red Dragon (1981)
A 1981 book that introduced the profiler as a hero to popular literature. Will Graham left the FBI and lives quietly because a past case…
