Classics of Russian Literature

Explore Russian masterpieces at all levels-characters, plots, scenes, and sometimes even single sentences-with an award-winning Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages.

• By This Professor
• 01: Origins of Russian Literature
• 02: The Church and the Folk in Old Kiev
• 03: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 1799-1837
• 04: Exile, Rustic Seclusion, and Onegin
• 05: December's Uprising and Two Poets Meet
• 06: A Poet Contrasts Talent versus Mediocrity
• 07: St. Petersburg Glorified and Death Embraced
• 08: Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol', 1809-1852
• 09: Russian Grotesque-Overcoats to Dead Souls
• 10: Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821-1881
• 11: Near Mortality, Prison, and an Underground
• 12: Second Wife and a Great Crime Novel Begins
• 13: Inside the Troubled Mind of a Criminal
• 14: The Generation of the Karamazovs
• 15: The Novelistic Presence of Christ and Satan
• 16: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910
• 17: Tale of Two Cities and a Country Home
• 18: Family Life Meets Military Life
• 19: Vengeance Is Mine, Saith the Lord
• 20: Family Life Makes a Comeback
• 21: Tolstoy the Preacher
• 22: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818-1883
• 23: The Stresses between Two Generations
• 24: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860-1904
• 25: M. Gorky (Aleksei M. Peshkov), 1868-1936
• 26: Literature and Revolution
• 27: The Tribune-Vladimir Maiakovsky, 1893-1930
• 28: The Revolution Makes a U-Turn
• 29: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, 1905-1984
• 30: Revolutions and Civil War
• 31: Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, 1895-1958
• 32: Among the Godless-Religion and Family Life
• 33: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1890-1960
• 34: The Poet In and Beyond Society
• 35: Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Born 1918
• 36: The Many Colors of Russian Literature