Essential Books by Russia's Nobel Prize Winning Authors

The Life of Arseniev is a novel with autobiographical motifs, beautifully depicting the life in pre-revolutionary Russia. The novel depicts the life of Alexei Arsenev and his impossible love for Lika. The novel, just like Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory is a chronicle of Russia which doesn’t exist any more.

Ivan Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his only novel, but he was mostly a short story writer. His stories contain small universes in themselves. They encapsulate perfectly small situations we know all too well. If you’re a fan of psychological realism, Bunin’s stories are worth your attention.

Doctor Zhivago is a monumental novel set in the times of the November Revolution, the Civil War and the early Soviet period. It is a story of a life torn apart by history, yet it is also a story of love, jealousy and betrayal. Doctor Zhivago, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, is Pasternak’s only novel. Throughout his life he wrote many poems and short stories, he also completed many literary translations.

Sholokhov was the only author sympathising with the Soviet authorities who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel which gained him the recognition was And Quiet Flows the Don, describing the life of the Cossacks in the period of the Civil War. The novel was announced to be one of the most important novels of the 20th century. Many modern critics believed Sholokov plagiarised the novel, but his authorship was eventually proven without a doubt.

One Day in Life of Ivan Denisovich was the first published work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature for the entirety of his work in 1970. It tells the story of one day in the life of an inmate in a Soviet forced labour camp. The publication of the story in the journal ‘Novyi Mir’ was the very first case of an open distribution of an account of the Stalinist repressions.

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s most important and most monumental work. It depicts in detail the life in a Soviet penal colony. Solzhenitsyn based the novel not only on his own first-hand experience of the camps, but also on thorough research.

In the First Circle is a novel which depicts a very specific kind of forced labour camps: the camps for intellectuals and engineers, who were forced to employ their talents to serve the needs of the Soviet empire. The conditions in those camps were thought to be significantly better than in others, hence why inmates referred to them as ‘the first circle’, by way of analogy to the first circle of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the First Circle draws an even fuller picture of the reality of Soviet forced labour camps.