Best Russian Short Stories - Free Audiobook

Best Russian Short Stories is an anthology compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer and published in New York in 1917, at a moment when English-speaking readers were rapidly discovering Russian literature. Seltzer contributed an introduction surveying the Russian short story and several of the translations himself.

The collection runs roughly in chronological order, from the age of Pushkin in the early nineteenth century to writers who were still active when the book appeared. Pushkin's eerie gambling tale The Queen of Spades and Gogol's story of a poor copying clerk and his precious new overcoat stand near the beginning. Later pages bring in Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, followed by a newer generation that includes Korolenko, Gorky and Andreyev. The stories range widely in mood, from comic and satirical sketches to ghostly episodes, peasant parables and sombre studies of conscience and suffering.

Taken together, the book shows how the Russian short story grew from Romantic storytelling toward the psychological realism and bleak modern tone of the early twentieth century. Because each piece is self-contained, it is an easy collection to dip into one story at a time. It suits newcomers looking for a sampler of the major Russian writers, readers who already love Tolstoy or Chekhov and want to meet their peers, and anyone curious about the roots of the modern short story.