„alma books”

Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and his family?s fall from grace and loss of status, the narrative focuses on his love for Liza, the daughter of a sen...

Over the last fifteen years of his life, Tolstoy collected and published the maxims of some of the world?s greatest masters of philosophy, religion and literature, adding his own contributions to various questions that preoccupied him in old age, such as faith and existence, as well as matters of everyday life. Banned in R...

The founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted ? through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry ? a long-lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no mean less important aspect of his writing...

In order to repay a small debt, the young student Mitya is persuaded by a friend to falsify a bank bond and cash it in. Little does he suspect that this small misdemeanour will have a profound impact on the lives of many other people around him ? indirectly even leading to the gravest of crimes. This in turn sets off a lon...

Written in 1932, but not published until 1962, over twenty years after its author?s death, The Life of Monsieur de Moli?re charts the life of the French playwright, from his humble beginnings to later theatrical triumphs and political controversies. The work was met with disapproval by the Soviet authorities, who detected ...

A drama of ambition, murder, remorse and retribution, Boris Godunov charts the decline of a Russian statesman, whose dynastic aims were foiled by a guilty past and an audacious upstart. Based on history and inspired by Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin?s daring masterwork is presented here in its rarely published uncensored v...

In order to rescue his beloved Lyudmila, who has been abducted by the evil wizard Chernomor, the warrior Ruslan faces an epic and perilous quest, encountering a multitude of fantastic and terrifying characters along the way. The basis for Glinka?s famous opera of the same name, Ruslan and Lyudmila ? Pushkin?s second longes...

In ?The Death of a Civil Servant?, an administrative clerk accidentally sneezes on a hierarchical superior at the opera, which results in great embarrassment and hilarious and futile attempts at atonement. The other short stories included in this volume, ?A Calculated Marriage?, ?The Culprit?, ?The Exclamation Mark?, ?The ...

The civil servant Ivan Matveich and his wife Yelena Ivanovna are spectators of an exhibition ? in a shopping arcade ? of a crocodile owned by a German, when Ivan is suddenly swallowed alive by the animal. Unsuccessful in his attempts to be freed from his prison, due to the German?s concern for his crocodile and excessive d...

In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe?s masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera?s eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unb...

One of Tolstoy?s last published works of fiction, The Devil revolves around the young landowner Yevgeny?s irrepressible lust for Stepanida, a sensual peasant woman. Even when he gets married to a respectable upper-class lady, he finds himself unable to put an end to his encounters with Stepanida, and becomes increasingly c...

Coming back to the ?nest? of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known when th...

One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues ? translated here for the first time into English in its entirety ? took Bunin?s poetic mastery of language to new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the pre...

First published in 1831, Belkin?s Stories was the first completed work of fiction by the founding father of Russian literature. Through a series of interlinked stories purporting to have been told by various narrators to the recently deceased country squire Ivan Belkin, Pushkin offers his own variation on themes and genres...

The story of Mowgli, the abandoned ?man-cub? who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as the bear Baloo, the graceful black panther Bagheera and Shere Khan...