1) Lolita (1955-58) Lolita is without doubt Vladimir Nabokov s most provocative work.

The story of a relationship between a mature man and a 12-year-old girl both gri pped and scandalized readers. Stanley Kubrick directed the film in 1962 from a s cript written by Nabokov himself. The work ranks fourth in the Modern Library to p 100 English-language works. 2) Crime and Punishment (1866) Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote this urban novel, publishe d in 1866, about the criminal ambitions and delusions of an impoverished student . The author himself serialized the work to pay back a gambling debt. One of the Russian novels most frequently adapted to film (8 films have been made), it has provided the basis for a multitude of stage plays. 3) Anna Karenina (1873-77) The novel s famous opening sentence, All happy families ar e alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion, (Penguin Classic s translation) has become known as the Anna Karenina principle. Readers follow the emotional decline and eventual tragedy that befalls Anna, although a few resent what they view as the melodramatic plot. The novel has been adapted to the scre en more than 20 times all over the world. The upcoming British version, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law, will be released in September. 4) War and Peace (1863-69) This four-volume epic novel was conceived as a story ab out the Decembrists, the 19th century opposition movement spawned within the ari stocracy. Yet, to trace the sources of the Decembrist movement, Tolstoy also del ved into the history of the 1812 war against Napoleon. The author rewrote the no vel in longhand about seven times and some episodes more than twenty times. Each time he edited it, he found ideological and artistic flaws in it, he later said . 5) The Brothers Karamazov (1880) This is known as Dostoyevsky s most philosophical a nd intellectually challenging work. The writer died before completing it. The ex isting novel is only the first part of what was to be The Story of a Great Sinner . By the end of the series, Alexei Karamazov was to become a revolutionary. The w riter did not live to see the first attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II, ot herwise that event might have led him, a monarchist, to give the novel a differe nt twist. 6) The Master and Margarita (1929-40) Unofficially, Russian critics refer to Mikha il Bulgakov s novel, The Master and Margarita, as the most intriguing of all the 20t h-century novels. The plot consists of a novel within a novel, stories from differ ent cultures and epochs and unorthodox portrayals of the Devil and Jesus all of wh ich are striking and highly unusual for Russian literature. The Soviet authoriti es could not accept a novel that touched on religious matters and, for a long ti me, it was available only through samizdat (self-publishing), while the first po sthumous publication in Russian was heavily censored. 7) The Idiot (1868) Dostoyevsky s novel, The Idiot refers to an unduly humble and timi d person; in this case, Prince Myshkin, is an embodiment of Christian morality, but after years in a sanatorium for seizures, he becomes entangled with two wome n, who appear to be moral opposites. The Prince is a classic holy fool, too nave and too trusting for the menaces of the real world. 8) Doctor Zhivago (1945-55) Doctor Zhivago is at once a novel and a collection of po ems by the doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago. The Soviet Communist Party felt that Bo ris Pasternak gave an ambiguous interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution and o ther glorious pages in the history of Communism. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel P rize in 1958 but the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was enraged by the hig h appraisal of an anti-Soviet novel. Pasternak was forced to reject the prize. D octor Zhivago was published finally in the Soviet Union toward the end of perest roika (1988), when the writer s son received his great father s Nobel diploma.

9) Notes from Underground (1864) This short satirical work by Fyodor Dostoyevsky r eflects his artistic and ideological principles. A deeply disturbed man narrates his own story as he finds himself on the verge of insanity. He is one of the fi rst anti-heroes in fiction, and is the precursor of the tragic characters in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. The character is one of he last members of the Russian intelligentsia to challenge the rest of the world . 10) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1959) A brutal rendering of the Soviet labor camps, the work shook the Soviet Union and the whole world with its portr ayal of the horrors of daily life in a GULAG camp. The poet Anna Akhmatova made this comment on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: This is a story everyone must read and learn by heart every citizen of the Soviet Union. Miraculously, Nik ita Khrushchev approved of the story and it was spared the fate of underground l iterature, unlike other truthful accounts of labor camps. Yet Solzhenitsyn s other stories of the GULAG were less favorably received in the U.S.S.R. and the writer was expelled from the country after being awarded the No bel Prize. 11) We (1920) American and French readers bought the novel before Yevgeny Zamyatin s fellow-countrymen. The novel was first published in New York. In the USSR, it w as published during the perestroika years, like many other undesirable works. This 1920 anti-utopia had influenced George Orwell s 1984, Ray Bradbury s Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley s The Brave New World. Yevgeny Zamyatin was inspired by the science f iction of Herbert Wells. 12) Pale Fire (1962) Vladimir Nabokov conceived of this novel before he he United States, but remarkably, he wrote as an migr in English. It is h a non-linear structure and a host of literary allusions. Even the title rowed from Shakespeare s tragedy Timon of Athens : The moon s an arrant ale fire she snatches from the sun. moved to t a poem wit is bor thief,/And her p

13) Dead Souls (1842) Nikolai Gogol s Dead Souls is as funny as it is great. The brilli ant and biting plot involves the character Chichikov, a man with modest means wh o makes an industrious trade of dead serfs by keeping them alive on paper. Thoug h written in prose, Gogol thought of the comic satire as a poem. He planned to w rite three volumes corresponding, respectively, to Dante s Paradise, Purgatory and Infe rno, in which the heroes were to traverse a path of transformation from soulless and spiritually bereft in the first volume to enlightened and high-minded in the third. But the writer thought even the second volume to be a failure and burned the unfinished version. Even so, the rough drafts survived and were published after the writer s death. In cidentally, the unusual plot was suggested to Gogol by the poet Alexander Pushki n. 14) Fathers and Sons (1861) Ivan Turgenev to this day offers an insightful portra yal of intergenerational conflict with Fathers and Sons. The main character, Yevge ny Bazarov, is a representative of superfluous people in literature. He puts ratio nality above all else and denies all feelings, which leads to his undoing. Yet e xalted 19th century intellectuals and revolutionaries admired Bazarov for his Ni hilism. 15) The Death of Ivan Ilych (1882-86) One of the latest works by Leo Tolstoy met w ith a cool reaction from readers and critics. The overly naturalistic and detail ed description of the illness and death of a man seemed, to his acolytes, un-Tol stoyan. Eventually, the hero finds bliss in death, which led Vladimir Nabokov to see echoes of Buddhism in it.

16) Night Watch (1998) Night Watch is the only contemporary work from the past decad e to make the Top 20 list. Sergey Lukyanenko s imagination created a whole world o f Others, powerful magicians who live among people, creating a spell-binding tal e of magic in Moscow. While the Light and Dark magicians settle accounts in the manner of special services using fireballs and chants instead of machine guns, t he heroes constantly face the dilemma of whether it is pardonable to use dark meth ods to achieve good ends. The first two of the watch novels were made into films by Timur Bekmambetov. 17) Demons (1872) Dostoyevsky s sixth novel is devoted to political matters and depi cts radical terrorists. In Russian literature, the revolution is generally depic ted as an irrepressible storm. Demons are the embodiment of the dark forces that drive the revolution and possess the heroes, making them violate the laws of hu manity and morality. 18) Eugene Onegin (1823-31) This is a novel in verse, a genre invented by poet Ale xander Pushkin to shake off the fetters of the novel and acquire poetic freedom. Foreign readers are captivated by the depiction of a bored Russian dandy. Initi ally, Pushkin admitted that he did not know what the end would be. The famous 19 th century critic Vissarion Belinsky described Eugene Onegin as an encyclopedia o f Russian life. 19) The Cherry Orchard (1903) Anton Chekhov subtitled this work a comedy but there i s little mirth in it. The break-up of a family is portrayed against the backdrop of the country s transformation and emergence of new attitudes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is Chekhov s last play, written shortly before the 1905 revolution. It is hard to think of another play that has been staged so oft en within Russia and elsewhere. 20) A Hero of Our Time (1838-40) Mikhail Lermontov s work further explores the antihero; thischaracter travels through the Caucasus and kidnaps a beautiful woman amo ng his many exploits. The narrator is first the author, then his fellow traveler , and finally the main hero. Lermontov gradually reveals the main character, Grigory Pechorin, as a world-wea ry young man who is incapable of strong feelings and brings nothing but sufferin g to the people around him. He belongs to the same category as the anti-heroes o f Pushkin s Eugene Onegin and Turgenev s Fathers and Sons. Readers continue to be drawn to these characters of limited feeling and self- destructive tendencies. The Rus sian anti-hero takes us on an emotionally charged journey. But in the end, they often help us feel better about ourselves!