What ho! We’re delighted that entries for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2026 are now open.
Publishers, you have until 12th June 2026 to submit your entries, via the form that you’ll find at /how-to-enter
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Ever since Pushkin, Russian poets have been famous for their ability to combine private and public experience in lyric poetry of a comprehensiveness and intensity unmatched elsewhere. Ranging in extremes from the melting tenderness of unrequited love to the bitter comedy of political chaos, this collection of poems, edited and introduced by Peter Washington, includes work by Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, Annensky,Mayakovsky, Bely, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Brodsky and others less celebrated but no less extraordinary.
The text is divided into six sections. Russian poets constantly reflect on their art, so the first section is appropriately entitled 'The Muse'. Their other great topic is Russia herself, explored in parts two and three. Part four presents the inner world, parts five and six traditional themes of love and mortality.
Poetry has often been a matter of life and death in Russia, where Mandelstam was not the only poet to perish in the Gulag. The comfortable private domain familiar to many English and American writers barely exists in a country where political realities are exigent - one reason for the fierce intensity found in so many of these poems.
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Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel.
While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing.
Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose, translated by Michael Glenny and introduced by Orlando Figes, brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex, interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.
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Edited and introduced by Christoph Keller, Russian Stories rounds up marvellous short stories by all the Russian literary greats, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Babel and Nabokov, and continuing up to contemporary writers such as Tatyana Tolstaya and the recent Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich.
Women writers are particularly well represented here, and predominate in the last fifty years. Also included is a story by the recently rediscovered Teffi, who was widely hailed a century ago in Russia as 'the female Chekhov'.
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Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia on 9 September 1828. In 1852 he published his first work, the autobiographical Childhood, with War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-8) becoming his most enduringly popular masterpieces.
Initially conceived as a love story, Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last novel, is a dark masterpiece in which the whole of Imperial Russian society is tried and found wanting.
Resurrection moves from the salons and country estates of the aristocracy to courtrooms and government offices, brothels and prisons; from Moscow and St Petersburg by road, rail and route march to the penal settlements of Siberia. Its pages are peopled with convicts and gaolers, revolutionaries and religious sectaries, soldiers, labourers and lawyers, peasants, priests and prostitutes. While for Prince Nekhlyudov and Katusha Maslova salvation through love proves problematic, the journey into exile becomes one of self-discovery and spiritual transformation.
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The archetypal Romantic, killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37, Alexander Pushkin was effectively the founder of modern Russian literature. Though famous as a poet, he was equally at home in prose, and this volume includes all his short fiction, as well as unfinished sketches and fragments, introduced by John Bayley, and translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Here of course are his masterpieces, 'The Queen of Spades', Pushkin's ironic take on both the supernatural and the society tale, the terse, deadpan Tales of Belkin, often humorous yet imbued with deep understanding of human nature, and his unsurpassable novella, The Captain's Daughter, which, informed by his meticulous research into the Pugachev Rebellion against Catherine the Great, is a perfect combination of folk epic, historical narrative and romance.
Other works include the richly comic 'A History of the Village of Goriukhino', the imaginative historical fiction 'The Moor of Peter the Great' (based on the life of the author's own great-grandfather. Pushkin was particularly proud of his African ancestry), and 'Journey to Arzrum', the fascinating autobiographical account of his (unauthorised, and greatly displeasing to the Tsar) travels in the Caucasus at the time of the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish war.
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The famous stage-designer Ivan Bilibin was a self-taught artist who was lucky enough to be offered the commission of a lifetime at the very start of his career. In 1899 the Department for the Production of State Documents asked this young Russian artist to illustrate a series of fairy tales, a task that took him four years to complete and inspired his finest work, reflecting his deep love for his country and his passionate interest in its national dress and wooden architecture.
This, with ten other traditional tales, make up our Russian Fairy Tales collection, for which all Bilibin's original artwork has been faithfully reproduced. Gillian Avery has provided a retelling of the texts, which admirably complements Bilibin's distinctive illustration, itself rooted in the stylized forms of Russian folk and medieval art.
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Alongside Ivan Turgenev, we're proud to publish many renowned Russian writers of prose, plays and poetry, many of whom challenged the cultural and political establishment of their times. Over the next few weeks, let us inspire you with some suggestions and help you discover your next favourite Russian read.
To begin, why not try the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, translated here by D M Thomas? From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag.
Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequence mourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.
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This month, we published a new, collected edition of Nest of the Gentry and Virgin Soil by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett and with an introduction by Andrew Kahn.
Turgenev was a supreme artist; in both these novels, one early and one late in his career, his profound humanity, his love for nature and for the Russian countryside, shine through the lyrical elegance of his prose.
Nest of the Gentry was Turgenev’s most popular work in his lifetime, and with good reason. An elegiac story of love and loss, it is both universal and particularly Russian. The hero Fyodor Lavretsky, son of a wealthy landowner and educated in the Western style, falls romantically in love with a woman he meets at the Moscow opera; they settle in Paris.
When the marriage fails, he returns to Russia, a rootless cosmopolitan or ‘superfluous man’. Back on his country estate, can he make a new start, reconcile himself to his responsibilities to the land and the people, and achieve an almost spiritual fulfilment in his love for his young cousin Liza?
In Virgin Soil, an older Turgenev boldly tackles the new radical politics of his era. The Tsarist regime is increasingly under challenge. Young people are flocking to the countryside to live side by side with the peasants, both to learn from them and to radicalise them. Poet Alexey Nezhdanov is an unlikely revolutionary, an over-thinking Hamlet figure, and a tragedy waiting to happen. While working as a tutor on a country estate, he is attracted to the self-assured and politically committed Marianna – an ardent idealist determined to sacrifice herself for the revolutionary cause.
Turgenev, himself a liberal, deals sympathetically with his characters, respecting the seriousness of purpose of this new generation whose methods he could not endorse. Virgin Soil turned Turgenev into an international figure, and explicator of the perplexing Russian political scene (in its year of publication hundreds of young Populists were brought to trial, many receiving heavy sentences); in Russia it was roundly condemned on all sides.
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I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
Wishing a very happy birthday to the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, today and a happy St George's Day to all our English readers.
Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet is one of the great comic literary mothers. She is by turns peevish, plagued by nerves, frivolous, flirtatious and, most of all, determined that her daughters will marry well.
Is her single-mindedness evidence of her unwavering love for her girls, and her desire to give them the best life she can, or is she a woman looking out for herself and her position in society?
While her exclamations and obsessions make her husband and daughter Lizzie roll their eyes, and her ‘inferior’ family nearly prevents Mr Darcy from proposing, she is a constant source of entertainment for the reader, as her cry of “Mr Bennet!” follows us through the pages.
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Mothers in literature come in many forms: caring, tender, powerful, angry or even absent. But the most iconic literary mothers stay with the reader long after the book is finished.
In Beloved, Sethe is torn between her fierce love for her children and her recognition of the essential incompatibility of motherhood with enslavement. She only vaguely remembers her own mother and, as Paul D observes of Sethe and Denver, “to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.”
While her escape from Sweet Home shows her fierce determination to protect Denver, so her tragic act, on which the novel hinges, can be read as the ultimate demonstration of maternal love: Sethe will not allow her children to experience the pain and trauma of enslavement that she has had to endure.
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