The Great Russian Short Story Collection

25 Classic Tales by the Great Russian Authors

By: Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fedor Sologub, Alexander Pushkin, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: Cathy Dobson

The ultimate collection of great short stories by the best Russian classic authors.

• 1. "Her Lover" by Maxim Gorky
• 2. "The Empty Drum" by Count Leo Tolstoy
• 3. "The Hoop" by Fedor Sologub
• 4. "The District Doctor" by Ivan Turgenev
• 5. "The White Dog" by Fedor Sologub
• 6. "The Cloak" by Nikolai Gogol
• 7. "A Soothing Dream" by Fedor Sologub
• 8. "The Christmas Tree and the Wedding" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 9. "A Work of Art" by Anton Chekhov
• 10. "Children Wiser Than Their Fathers" by Count Leo Tolstoy
• 11. "The Bet" by Anton Chekhov
• 12. "The Coffin Maker" by Alexander Pushkin
• 13. "The Three Hermits" by Count Leo Tolstoy
• 14. "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Maxim Gorky
• 15. "The Queen of Spades" by Alexander Pushkin
• 16. "A Candle" by Count Leo Tolstoy
• 17. "The Self-Sacrificing Rabbit" by Nicolai Schedrin
• 18. "The Honest Thief" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 19. "Comrades" by Maxim Gorky
• 20. "The Long Exile" by Count Leo Tolstoy
• 21. "The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol
• 22. "The Chorus Girl" by Anton Chekhov
• 23. "The Old Verger" by Vladimir Korolenko
• 24. "The Encased Man" by Anton Chekhov
• 25. "The Pistol Shot" by Alexander Pushkin

Public Domain (P)2015 Red Door Audiobooks

Great selection ruined by abysmal narration.

Superb selection but the narration ruined the experience. Dobson reads every sentence as one would read a fairy tale to a child. Somehow she managed to strip profound passages of meaning with her annoying overdramatic performance. Her unwarranted emphasis on every last word of a sentence was cringeworthy. So disappointing because she ruined the magnificent selections.

Narrator is detestable.

I can't finish because I cannot concentrate. the narrator sounds silly, and I don't know why she has to make things sound "scary" when they're not. Seriously, every story is a horror story because of her narration. Very annoying.

Room for improvement

I greatly admire the writers represented here. I was frustrated at not knowing more clearly which one I was listening to. Cathy Dobson has an intriguing voice, but also a few idiosyncrasies of phrasing and diction that I at first found distracting -- later on, I got used to them, yet still found they drained away some of the power of the stories.

Who pressed the record button?

As much as I liked the stories, and tried to block the nature of the narrator’s voice, I couldn’t last more than 45 minutes of listening to this narrator. Who produced this, who directed it and how a sound engineer is ok with recording this monotone, raspy, slithery voice for a whooping 11 hours. Couldn’t she at least change the voice a bit for each story?

Terrible narrator

What didn’t you like about Cathy Dobson’s performance?

Every three words she does a downward inflection and a drag! It really makes no difference what she's reading: the title, the author's name, the middle or the end of a sentence. It's so terribly monotonic, I replayed a 10 minutes story three times and still could not follow. This is by far the worst audio book I've ever gotten.