A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A sensitive law student joins two friends on a tour of Moscow brothels and finds himself unable to accept their practiced indifference.
A comfortable reformer judges a village priest unfit for service, then learns what hunger looks like when pride tries to hide it.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A failed hunting trip brings a ruined prince to the edge of an estate owned by the wealthy woman he once refused to marry.
A wealthy factory owner spends Christmas confronting the distance between her good intentions, her workers, and the life she longs to lead.
A married young woman crosses the river at night to meet an idle village watchman, knowing the morning will demand an answer.
A strong old actor falls ill far from home, while his theatrical companions mistake remedies and affection for understanding.
An idle landscape painter befriends two sisters and finds love complicated by a fierce argument over art, work, and social duty.
A landowner discovers the exact price of being noticed in a government office.
Once a year, a lazy village drunk becomes an exacting artist whose work belongs to an entire community.
Returning to her family estate, a young heiress finds the freedom of the steppe at odds with the narrow life waiting for her at home.
A barber learns midway through a free haircut that poverty has cost him the woman he loves.
Five rainy days without her husband send a devoted young wife into town, where his empty flat raises an unwelcome question.
Weeks before her wedding, a young woman begins to see her comfortable provincial life—and the future chosen for her—with new clarity.
At a remote railway station on New Year’s Eve, a bored official dares fate to prove that his life can still become worse.
Five children turn a forbidden late-night game of loto into a small world of greed, vanity, kindness, quarrels, and sudden sleep.
A village choirmaster drills his singers for months to impress a visiting count who may not care to hear them.
A student asks his volatile father for money to return to Moscow, turning an ordinary family dinner into a reckoning none can resolve.
Escorted through autumn mud, a nameless tramp describes the free Siberian life he hopes awaits him beyond prison.
On Easter night, a ferry monk mourns the gentle hymn writer whose words the celebrating monastery never learned to value.
Minutes after his only child dies, a doctor is summoned to another household and must weigh private grief against professional duty.
At an Epiphany fête, three prosperous old men recall what severe cold meant before wealth protected them from it.
Two tipsy lawyers take a wrong turn after a long walk from the station and break into the wrong country cottage.
A visit to his brother’s long-dreamed-of estate forces a traveler to ask what private happiness costs those left outside it.
