A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
by Ken Kalfus | 
The Clay Machine-Gun
by Victor Pelevin | 
Buddha's Little Finger
by Victor Pelevin | 
Let's Put the Future Behind Us
by Jack Womack | 
The Beginning of Spring
by Penelope Fitzgerald | 
Between Dog and Wolf
by Sasha Sokolov | 
Once Upon the River Love
by Andrei Makine | 
The Fur Hat
by Vladimir Voinovich | 
The Dead Lake
by Hamid Ismailov | 
The Life of Insects
by Victor Pelevin | 
A School for Fools
by Sasha Sokolov | 
The Silver Dove
by Andrei Bely | 
Farewell to Matyora
by Valentin Rasputin | 
The President's Last Love
by Andrey Kurkov | 
Honey for the Bears
by Anthony Burgess | 
A Week Like Any Other
by Natalya Baranskaya | 
PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
by Ken Kalfus | 
Nihilist Girl
by Sofya Kovalevskaya | 
Pushkin House
by Andrei Bitov | 
Three Years
by Anton Chekhov |
Russia, 1910. Leo Tolstoy lies dying in Astapovo, a remote railway station. Members of the press from around the world have descended upon this sleepy hamlet to record his passing for a public suddenly ravenous for celebrity news. They have been joined by a film company whose cinematographer, Nikolai Gribshin, is capturing the extraordinary scene and learning how to wield his camera as a political tool. At this historic moment he comes across two men -- the scientist, Professor Vorobev, and the revolutionist, Joseph Stalin -- who have radical, mysterious plans for the future. Soon they will accompany him on a long, cold march through an era of brutality and absurdity. The Commissariat of Enlightenment is a mesmerizing novel of ideas that brilliantly links the tragedy and comedy of the Russian Revolution with the global empire of images that occupies our imaginations today.