Home › Authors › Best Russian Authors
Reading List · Russian-Language Fiction & TestimonyThe Best Russian Authors to Read
Russian literature goes straight at the questions most books circle: what makes a person good, what we owe each other, and whether anyone can live with themselves after doing something unforgivable. It does this without apology and usually at length, which is why it frightens people off and why it keeps being read.
Three writers below, in the order they were born. Two are Russian. The third is Belarusian and writes in Russian, which is a real distinction and the page keeps it. Each has a full guide here with the complete bibliography and a starting point.
Three authors, and where to start with each
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821–1881 · Moscow
In April 1849 he was arrested for belonging to a circle that discussed banned books. That December he was taken to a square in Petersburg, tied up in front of a firing squad, and told he was about to be shot. A letter from the tsar arrived commuting the sentence — the whole thing had been staged. He then spent four years at hard labour in Omsk. Everything he wrote afterwards is by a man who has already been told he has minutes left.
He does not really write about crime. He writes about what happens inside someone after they cross a line they cannot uncross, and he refuses to let the reader settle on an answer. He had epilepsy and a gambling habit that kept him writing to deadline and in debt, which is part of why the books feel driven rather than composed.
Start with Crime and Punishment (1866). If that is too much, Notes from Underground (1864) is under 150 pages and contains the argument in miniature. Then The Brothers Karamazov (1880), his last and largest.
All Fyodor Dostoevsky books →Vladimir Nabokov
1899–1977 · Born St Petersburg, died Montreux
Born into a wealthy Petersburg family that lost everything in 1917. He wrote his first nine novels in Russian, in Berlin and Paris, under the pen name Sirin; then he moved to America in 1940 and started again in English, in his forties, and became one of the best prose stylists the language has.
He is the opposite of Dostoevsky in method. Where Dostoevsky throws you into the chaos, Nabokov hands you a sentence so beautiful you almost miss what it is admitting. Lolita works precisely because Humbert is charming and the reader has to keep noticing what the charm is covering. Nabokov was also a serious lepidopterist, and catalogued butterflies at Harvard.
Start with Lolita, published in Paris in 1955 because no American house would touch it, and in the United States in 1958. Then Pale Fire (1962), or Speak, Memory if you would rather have the Russia he lost than the America he arrived in.
All Vladimir Nabokov books →Svetlana Alexievich
Born 1948 · Stanislav, Ukrainian SSR — now Ivano-Frankivsk
She is Belarusian, not Russian. She writes in Russian, which is why she turns up on lists like this one, and she has spent her career documenting what the Soviet Union did to the people inside it. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 — the first writer from Belarus to do so — for what the Academy called “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.
Her books are built from interviews, hundreds of them, arranged rather than summarised. She does not explain what the voices mean. War's Unwomanly Face is the Second World War told by the women who fought it and were then expected to be quiet about it; Voices from Chernobyl is the disaster told by the people who were sent in.
Start with Voices from Chernobyl (1997), also published as Chernobyl Prayer. Then Second-hand Time (2013), on what people lost when the Soviet Union ended, or War's Unwomanly Face (1985).
All Svetlana Alexievich books →Which of the three should you read?
| Author | Where from | Best for | Start with | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Russian | Guilt, faith, why people act against themselves | Crime and Punishment | Long |
| Vladimir Nabokov | Russian-American | Prose, unreliable narrators, memory | Lolita | Medium |
| Svetlana Alexievich | Belarusian, writes in Russian | Testimony, the Soviet century, ordinary people | Voices from Chernobyl | Medium |
Dostoevsky invents a murderer to ask what guilt does to a person. Alexievich does not invent anyone: she records hundreds of real people and lets the same question answer itself. A hundred and thirty years apart, in the same language, working from opposite ends.
If these three interested you
Not Russian, but the guides readers of Dostoevsky and Alexievich tend to open next.
Frequently asked questions about Russian authors
Which Russian author should I read first?
Dostoevsky, and specifically Crime and Punishment (1866) — it has a plot that pulls you along while the moral argument runs underneath. If the length puts you off, Notes from Underground (1864) is under 150 pages and contains the same thinking in miniature. If you would rather have sentences than psychology, start with Nabokov instead.
Is Svetlana Alexievich Russian?
No. She is Belarusian, and it matters to her. She was born in 1948 in Stanislav in the Ukrainian SSR, now Ivano-Frankivsk, and writes in Russian — which is why she appears on lists of Russian authors, including this one. She was the first writer from Belarus to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2015, and has spent much of her career as a critic of the Belarusian and Russian governments. Calling her a Russian writer gets the language right and the person wrong.
Is Nabokov a Russian writer or an American one?
Both, in sequence. He was born in St Petersburg in 1899 and wrote his first nine novels in Russian, publishing in Berlin and Paris under the name Sirin. He moved to the United States in 1940, became a citizen in 1945, and wrote everything after that in English, including Lolita and Pale Fire. He died in Switzerland in 1977. Russian literature claims the first half of his career and American literature the second, and both are right.
Did Dostoevsky really face a firing squad?
Yes, and it was deliberately staged. He was arrested in April 1849 for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that met to discuss banned political writing, and sentenced to death. On 23 December 1849 he was taken to Semyonov Place in St Petersburg and made to wait in front of the firing squad before a letter arrived from the tsar commuting the sentence. He was sent instead to four years of hard labour in Omsk, followed by compulsory military service. He was twenty-eight.
How many Russian writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Five writers from Russia or the Soviet Union: Ivan Bunin in 1933, Boris Pasternak in 1958 (who was forced to decline it), Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970 and Joseph Brodsky in 1987. Svetlana Alexievich won in 2015 but is Belarusian, not Russian.
Why is Russian literature so long?
Mostly because of how it was published. The nineteenth-century novels appeared in monthly instalments in literary journals, and writers were paid by the sheet, so length was both a formal habit and an income. Dostoevsky in particular wrote to deadline while in debt. The reputation is also unfair: Notes from Underground is under 150 pages, and Alexievich's books can be read a testimony at a time.
Which translation of Dostoevsky should I read?
There is no settled answer and readers argue about it seriously. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translations are the most widely sold and stay close to the Russian sentence; the older Constance Garnett versions read more smoothly in English and are free out of copyright; Oliver Ready's Crime and Punishment is the most recent and the most colloquial. If you are unsure, read the first page of two of them in a shop and take whichever one you would keep reading.
Where should I start with Svetlana Alexievich?
Voices from Chernobyl (1997), also published as Chernobyl Prayer. It is the most self-contained of her books and the one people most often finish in a sitting, despite what it is about. Second-hand Time (2013) is the larger achievement — what people lost when the Soviet Union ended, told by hundreds of them — and War's Unwomanly Face (1985) is the one that made her name.
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, letter to his brother Mikhail, 1839
Each of the three has a full guide here: the complete bibliography, publication order, and an honest answer to which book to open first.
Browse every author guide Find an author like one you love