Reviews of some recent books on Tolstoy, Spying and the end of the USSR. And a new translation of an often overlooked work by Dostoyevsky. As published in the November/December 2011 issue of Russian Life.

It should come as no surprise,” writes Vyacheslav Pyetsukh at the beginning of The New Moscow Philosophy, “that where literature goes life follows, that Russians not only write what they live but in part live what they write…”

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, Lev Tolstoy made the first of several walking journeys from Moscow to Tula – a distance of nearly 200 kilometers. A pair of Americans retrace the great writer’s journey, in a considerably different Russia.

Listen to the Book Expo America podcast episode with 4 Russian writers who were finalists for the Debut Prize, the prestigious independent literary award for authors under the age of 25 writing in Russian. I am very pleased to point out that Iryna Bogatyreva, one of the writers featured on this panel, is represented in the

Reviews of five books: Snowdrops by A.D. Miller; Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente; The Russian Word's Worth, by Michele A. Berdy; The Three Fat Men, by Yuri Olesha; Memoir of a Gulag Actress, by Tamara Petkevich.

This amazing collection of fiction and non-fiction by one of the 20th century's most talented and most overlooked writers re-demonstrates that Grossman was a meticulous documentarian of the Russian soul.