The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense

✍ Scribed by Penzler, Otto (editor)

• Book ID: 108600338
• Publisher: Pegasus
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 227 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Many of the greatest Russian authors, including Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, Chekhov and Pushkin, produced crime and mystery fiction, a type of literature that was largely suppressed during the
Soviet era because it did not glorify the state but, instead, gave
individual characters the significance that the U.S.S.R. despised.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, mystery writers have become
some of the most successful novelists in Russia, and there is a
renewed interest in, and appreciation of, the great crime classics
of an earlier era.

There have been few policemen, and virtually no private detectives or amateur sleuths, in Russian history worthy of approbation, and in consequence its literature is dramatically different
from its Western counterparts. Criminals in Mother Russia tend to
be caught or punished by their own consciences or by ghosts, and
the notion of a criminal trial as we know it is utterly alien. Nonetheless, the enormous talent and passion of Russian authors has
long been justly acclaimed, and the rare forays they made into the
loosely defined genre of mystery fiction rank among the worlds
classics. This volume is the first collection ever devoted entirely to
Russian crime fiction.

Among the esteemed contributors are Anton Chekhov, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Nicolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Vil
Lipitov, Alexander Pushkin, Lev Sheinen, Boris Sokoloff and Leo
Tolstoy.

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