Vodka gets its fair share of PR as far as Russia is concerned. But is it always for the right reasons? October 24 marks the birth of Venedikt Erofeev, at least as well known for his drinking and vagrancy as for his writing.

It's one thing to become famous as a writer or poet in your own country. But what does it take to earn yourself a spot in world literature? By describing the promise of Soviet poet, songwriter, and classic Bulat Okudzhava, translators offer us some insight.

Andrei Platonov spawned many an incongruous image and incomprehensible sentence. Compared by some scholars to James Joyce, he was critiqued by Stalin himself, yet he avoided prosecution. We dig into his challenging literary style.

July 13 is the anniversary of Isaac Babel's birth. Now celebrated as one of teh great writers of the twentieth century, he had a very difficult time gaining acceptance during his lifetime, and repeatedly suffered from antisemitism, official and otherwise.

How many characters are in Tolstoy's War and Peace? Could it have been any shorter? Did Tolstoy himself love it or hate it? Find out the answers to these – and more! – questions in this quick list of little-known War and Peace facts.

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...

A look back at the end of St. Petersburg's avant garde hangout for poets and bohemians.

The writer Yuri Nagibin led an incredibly hard life, although, by Soviet standards, from the outside his life may have looked charmed.

We have just finished our 45-day Kickstarter project for the book Red Star Tales, and we are speechless. Almost.

On January 8, 1815 was the monumental "meeting" of Alexander Pushkin and Gavrila Derzhavin, the greatest poets of their respective generations.

Boris Pasternak was born 125 years ago. We look back at how he has been remembered.

As a special gift, we share a somewhat untypical holiday story, reprinted from the pages of Chtenia, by the master humorist and short story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko.