BEST RUSSIAN SHORT NOVELS

Theophany Convent (Богоявленский монастырь, Кострома), May, 2003

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Recently Rob Burdock @RobAroundBooks retweeted from Apostrophe Books a list of 46 Best Short Novels that you can read in a day.

These include "The Great Gatsby," which probably should be savored for its prose, not read in one day.

Other greats are Marquez's "Memories of My Melancholy Whores." Probably a better choice for a short Marquez novel would be the wonderful, "Chronicle of A Death Foretold."

Then there is Kosinsky's "Being There," a rare example of a situation in which the movie (with Peter Sellers) is better than the book.


There are no Russian novellas in this list, so here are my choices for best Russian short novels (or long stories, if you want to look at it that way), listed in no particular order of merit:

Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"

Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"

Lev Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from the Rat Hole"

Ivan Bunin, "Drydale"

Vladimir Nabokov, "The Eye"

Anton Chekhov, "The Duel"

Yury Olesha, "Envy"


                                Front Cover, Russian Translation of "The Great Gatsby"