Dissident Literature
The Tsar of Love and Techno - Anthony Marra
1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others.
The Talnikov Family - Avdotya Panaeva
In the Talnikov household, violence is in the air. Natasha grows up in a chaotic and abusive family, surrounded by screaming relatives and scurrying cockroaches. Her father whips his children but dotes on his pets. Her aunts and governess take a grim satisfaction in doling out discipline - in between primping and preening for suitors. Amid this bleakness, Natasha and her siblings conspire to steal stray moments of childhood joy. Avdotya Panaeva’s The Talnikov Family portrays a tumultuous upbringing in 1820s St. Petersburg with equal parts wit and rage.
The Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov
A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is now on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.
Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.
Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea - Teffi
The writer and satirist Teffi was a literary sensation in Russia until war and revolution forced her to leave her country forever. Memories is her blackly funny and heartbreaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia - travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer - and the 'ordinary and unheroic' people she encounters. From refugees setting up camp on a dockside to a singer desperately buying a few 'last scraps' of fabric to make a dress, all are caught up in the whirlwind; all are immortalised by Teffi's penetrating gaze. Fusing exuberant wit and bitter horror, this is an extraordinary portrayal of what it means to say goodbye, with haunting relevance in today's new age of diaspora.