Russian Century

Instant New York Times Bestseller! Why did one of the world’s most successful business titans, an oil magnate who rivaled the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, disappear from history? The author of the acclaimed bestseller The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel has the enthralling answer. With...

The greatest novel ever written — in the only English translation authorized by Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy began writing War and Peace in 1863, when he was thirty-five years old, recently married, and living on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He finished it six years later. In between, he read everything about Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, interviewed survivors, rewrote the opening section eight times, and produced a book that contains within it a novel, a historical essay, a philosophical treatise, and a love story — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in open contradiction with ...

Can the dream of freedom overcome fear and oppression? In this novel spanning Prague’s tumultuous twentieth century, friendships and marriages are tested to the limit. In the summer of 1914, young love beckons and the future seems bright for three friends as they reach adulthood, but the dark clouds of war throw into stark relief the differences between them which had never mattered before. From World War One and the heady days of liberty which follow, to Nazi occupation during World War Two, and afterwards Communist dictatorship, life threatening risks must be taken. Friends and families...

Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoevsky is an extraordinary early masterpiece by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova ranks as undoubtedly one of the great psychological novels of 19th-century Russian literature. First published in 1849, and famously unfinished, this haunting and deeply emotional work follows the formative years of Netochka, a young girl shaped by poverty, obsession, loss, and the complexities of love and identity. Though left unfinished following Dostoevsky’s arrest and exile, the novel remains one of his most compelling and revealing works, offering readers a powerful ...

By 1920 the outcome of the Civil War is being determined. Denikin's White Army has reached its furthest advance and broken; the Red Army is consolidating across the vast geography of the former Russian Empire; and the question that The Eighteenth Year had rendered in its full uncertainty — who will govern Russia, what will survive, whether the ordeal has a destination — is becoming an answer. The answer is bleak. It is also, Tolstoy insists in the word he chose for the trilogy's title, morning. Roshchin has been fighting for the White cause — the cause that drew the imperial officer, ...

With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present Spies have long been a source of great fascination in the world of fiction, but...

He ruled through terror and myth, shaping the twentieth century with brutality and ambition. From his rise as a revolutionary outsider to his domination of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin forged an empire of fear that scarred generations. Stalin: The Red Tsar and His Terror is a definitive biography that traces Stalin’s life from obscurity in Georgia to absolute power in Moscow, from his role in defeating Hitler to the machinery of purges, famine, and the Gulag. Drawing on survivor testimonies, archival evidence, and modern scholarship, this book reveals not only how Stalin ruled, but how...

Twenty-six days. One impossible deadline. A novel written in the grip of the addiction it portrays. Alexei Ivanovich is a young Russian tutor at a European gambling resort, hopelessly in love with Polina, his employer's stepdaughter. She treats him with calculated cruelty, alternating between encouragement and contempt, demanding he prove his devotion through increasingly degrading acts. When she asks him to win money for her at roulette, he discovers something more intoxicating than love: the heightened intensity of everything at stake, the suspension of rational thought, the conviction he...

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.

Enter the final, blazing chapter of a legend's journey. This definitive collection captures Alexander Pushkin's supreme artistic achievement during his last transformative years, 1829-1837, when Russia's national poet reached the pinnacle of his creative powers even as fate conspired toward his tragic destiny. Witness the master in his prime, as the exiled romantic returns to navigate the treacherous waters of Nicholas I's Russia with unparalleled artistic sophistication. These are the years of Pushkin's greatest triumphs: the completion of the immortal Eugene Onegin, the revolutionary ...

Inspired by real characters, this transporting historical fiction debut spins the fascinating story of two princesses in the Romanov court who practiced black magic, befriended the Tsarina, and invited Rasputin into their lives—forever changing the course of Russian history. As daughters of...

When a recent skeleton among ancient bones raises questions—and danger—forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is the only one who can solve the case in this “triumphant second appearance” (Publishers Weekly) from #1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs. Tempe Brennan is...

***NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER***An Explosive, Revelatory Assessment of the Greatest Betrayal in American History, Newly Revised and Updated William Barr · Paul Manafort · Michael Cohen · Steve Bannon · Rudy Giuliani · Mitch McConnell · Roger Stone · George Papadopoulos · Jeff Sessions ·...

Bestselling author Douglas Century reveals the untold story of the epic rise and fall of Boris Nayfeld, also known as Biba, one of the most notorious Russian mob bosses of our era. Boris Nayfeld, a.k.a. “Biba,” is the last living boss of the old-school Russian mob in America, and he’s...

In Mind Power: Into the 21st Century, John Kehoe has articulated a set of life-changing principles for charting a course to success and happiness. More than that, however, Mind Power: Into the 21st Century presents a remarkably specific and practical guide.

Twenty-five beautifully written stories, penned in exile, evocatively depicting life on a manor in feudal Russia and examining the conflicts between serfs and landlords A Sportsman’s Notebook, Ivan Turgenev’s first literary masterpiece, is a sweeping portrayal of the magnificent...

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted...

Petersburg, 1914. The white nights are beautiful, the literary cafés are arguing about art and apocalypse, and the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia are full of people whose cultivation of sensibility has been conducted, for a generation, at the expense of any adequate preparation for what is coming. The poet Bessonov — Silver Age genius, capable of seeing the catastrophe and incapable of doing anything with the seeing except rendering it in verse — moves through this world with the ease of someone who has mistaken the most beautiful form of inadequacy for a sufficient relationship ...

Family Happiness stands as one of Leo Tolstoy's most intimate and psychologically penetrating early works, written in 1859 when the author was just thirty-one years old. This slender novella, composed nearly a decade before the epic scope of War and Peace, reveals Tolstoy's already masterful ability to dissect the complexities of human relationships with surgical precision and profound empathy. The story unfolds through the voice of Masha, a seventeen-year-old girl who falls in love with Sergey Mikhaylych, her late father's friend and her family's guardian. What begins as a tale of ...