The Cossacks

Resurrection

• UNABRIDGED (20 hrs and 8 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Neville Jason

When Prince Dmitri Nekhludov is called for jury duty on a murder case, he little knows how the experience will change his life. Faced with the accused, a prostitute, he recognizes Katusha, the young girl he seduced and abandoned many years before, and realizes his responsibility for the life of degradation she has been forced to lead. His determination to make amends leads him into the darkest reaches of the Tsarist prison system, and to the beginning of his spiritual regeneration.

Fathers and Sons

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 16 mins)
• By Ivan Turgenev
• Narrated By David Horovitch

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticising the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away the traditional values of contemporary Russian society.

The Kreutzer Sonata

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 29 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Simon Prebble

One of the world’s greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy was also the author of a number of superb short stories, one of his best known being “The Kreutzer Sonata.” This macabre story involves the murder of a wife by her husband. It is a penetrating study of jealousy as well as a piercing complaint about the way in which society educates men and women in matters of sex - a serious condemnation of the mores and attitudes of the wealthy, educated class.

Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 12 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Simon Vance

In these two famous short novels, Leo Tolstoy takes readers to the brink of despair. At the end of life, worldly ambition offers no consolation for the spiritually empty soul, but Tolstoy is the master of themes and redemption. He turns his morbid topic into hope, leading toward spiritual awakening. Tolstoy offers his readers a lifetime of perspective on death.

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

• UNABRIDGED (27 hrs)
• By Thomas Mann
• Narrated By David Rintoul
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First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.

A Hero of Our Time

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 11 mins)
• By Mikhail Lermontov
• Narrated By Clive Chafer

In A Hero of Our Time, Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men. He is brave, determined, and willful, but his wasted energy and potential ultimately result in tragedy.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

• UNABRIDGED (2 hrs and 36 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Simon Prebble

Hailed as one of the world’s masterpieces of psychological realism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high-court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face-to-face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

Anna Karenina

• UNABRIDGED (35 hrs and 40 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Maggie Gyllenhaal
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Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.

Notes from the Underground

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 21 mins)
• By Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Narrated By Simon Vance
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A predecessor to such monumental works such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From Underground represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side.

In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives, withdraws from that society into the underground.

Master and Man

• UNABRIDGED (2 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Walter Zimmerman
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In the story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly to purchase the forest before other contenders can get there. They find themselves in the middle of a blizzard, but the master in his avarice wishes to press on. They eventually get lost off the road and they try to camp. The master's peasant soon finds himself suffering from hypothermia.

Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - a World on the Edge

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Helen Rappaport
• Narrated By Xe Sands
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From the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanov Sisters, Caught in the Revolution is Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eyewitness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold.

The Idiot

• UNABRIDGED (23 hrs and 39 mins)
• By Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Narrated By Alastair Cameron
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Young Prince Mishkin is that rare thing - a "completely beautiful human being". He is honest, humble, generous, and selfless, but unfortunately these traits mean he is often mistaken for an idiot. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, after being away at a Swiss sanatorium for the treatment of epilepsy, Prince Mishkin is taken under the wing of the wife of General Yepanchin, who arranges for him to live with the family of her money-obsessed friend Ganya.

War and Peace

• UNABRIDGED (61 hrs and 8 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Frederick Davidson

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy's genius is clearly seen in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle, all of them fully realized and equally memorable.

Dead Souls

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 54 mins)
• By Nikolai Gogol, C. J. Hogarth (translator)
• Narrated By Arthur Morey
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Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these "souls" as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Nikolai Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types.

The Idiot [Blackstone]

• UNABRIDGED (22 hrs and 33 mins)
• By Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Narrated By Robert Whitfield

Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing the wreckage left by human misery to find "man in man."

Devils

• UNABRIDGED (28 hrs and 2 mins)
• By Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Narrated By George Guidall

Exiled to four years in Siberia, but hailed by the end of his life as a saint, prophet, and genius, Fyodor Dostoevsky holds an exalted place among the best of the great Russian authors. One of Dostoevsky’s five major novels, Devils follows the travails of a small provincial town beset by a band of modish radicals - and in so doing presents a devastating depiction of life and politics in late 19th-century Imperial Russia.

The Wings of the Dove

• UNABRIDGED (22 hrs and 54 mins)
• By Henry James
• Narrated By Juliet Stevenson
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Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.

Father Sergius & Other Short Stories

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Leo Tolstoy
• Narrated By Simon Vance

Tolstoy brings to these brief tales the same psychological depth and spiritual insight found in his larger works. In fact, his short stories are an excellent place to begin reading this great author. In them, you will find the same challenging themes of morality, forgiveness, redemption and more.