Short-story masterpieces, Vol. 3

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It is inevitable that we should speculate upon the splendid work which might have come from the pen of this greatest of Russian poets had he not fallen in his prime. The story i...

No one in the house knew what had happened. The letters written by her on the eve of her planned elopement were burned; her maid, fearing the wrath of her master, had said a wor...

At length, a cause of war against the Tartars is cooked up and their city besieged. One night, Andríi, the younger son of Taras Bulba, is awakened by the gliding of a woman’s fi...

Akaki Akakievich had for some time felt the cold piercing his back and shoulders with unwonted vigor, notwithstanding the fact that he tried to cover the distance from his house...

Just where the inviting official lived, we unfortunately cannot say; our memory is beginning to fail us, and the St. Petersburg streets and houses have so badly massed and mixed...

But who could have imagined that this was not the end of Akaki Akakievich, and that he was destined to live through several stirring days after his death, in compensation, as it...

In “A Living Relic,”[2] Turgenev as the narrator strongly wakes a human chord. On a hunting expedition, he enters by chance an abandoned shed, where he finds a wretched human be...

“I’ll not go on, however, tiring you with any further details. As it is, I find it painful to recall it all. The girl died the next day. May the Holy Kingdom be hers!” added the...

After he had covered some forty versts, he stopped again for food; and, having rested and had his dinner in the shelter of the hotel, he ordered tea, got hold of a guitar, and b...