Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Leo Tolstoy

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

A nobleman faces the consequences of his youthful wrongdoing when the girl he seduced and abandoned some years earlier is put on trial in a murder case. Initially conceived as a love story, Tolstoy’s last novel, published in 1899, is a dark masterpiece in which the whole of Imperial Russian society is tried and found wanting. Resurrection moves from the salons and country estates of the aristocracy to courtrooms and government offices, brothels and prisons; from Moscow and St Petersburg by road, rail and route march to the penal settlements of Siberia. Its pages are peopled with convicts and gaolers, revolutionaries and religious sectaries, soldiers, labourers and lawyers, peasants, priests and prostitutes. While for Prince Nekhlyudov and Katusha Maslova salvation through love proves problematic, the journey into exile becomes one of self-discovery and spiritual transformation.

Resurrection

Ivan Turgenev

This volume pairs two novels, one early, one late, by Ivan Turgenev, master chronicler of nineteenth-century Russia. 
 
Nest of the Gentry (1859) was his most popular work in his lifetime, and with good reason. An elegiac story of love and loss, it is both universal and particularly Russian. The hero Fyodor Lavretsky, son of a wealthy landowner and educated in the Western style, falls romantically in love with a woman he meets at the Moscow opera; they settle in Paris. When the marriage fails, he returns to Russia, a rootless cosmopolitan or ‘superfluous man’. Back on his country estate, can he make a new start, reconcile himself to his responsibilities to the land and the people, and achieve an almost spiritual fulfilment in his love for his young cousin Liza? 
 
In Virgin Soil (1877), an older Turgenev boldly tackles the new radical politics of his era. The Tsarist regime is increasingly under challenge. Young people are flocking to the countryside to live side by side with the peasants, both to learn from them and to radicalise them. Poet Alexey Nezhdanov is an unlikely revolutionary, an over-thinking Hamlet figure, and a tragedy waiting to happen. While working as a tutor on a country estate, he is attracted to the self-assured and politically committed Marianna – an ardent idealist determined to sacrifice herself for the revolutionary cause. Turgenev, himself a liberal, deals sympathetically with his characters, respecting the seriousness of purpose of this new generation whose methods he could not endorse. Virgin Soil turned Turgenev into an international figure, and explicator of the perplexing Russian political scene (in its year of publication hundreds of young Populists were brought to trial, many receiving heavy sentences); in Russia it was roundly condemned on all sides. 
 
Turgenev was a supreme artist; in both these novels his profound humanity, his love for nature and for the Russian countryside, shine through the lyrical elegance of his prose.

Nest of the Gentry & Virgin Soil

Henrik Pontoppidan

Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark's capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that 'you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast ... and capture and bind it'. He falls in with Copenhagen's Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature. 
 Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark's landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of 'luck' to 'happiness' (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.

Lucky Per

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers.Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a “novel-pamphlet” in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia–a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky’s greatest. 
 
The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed.

Demons

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless seduces by its combination of superbly drawn characters, narrative brilliance and manic comedy.

Crime And Punishment

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life. Volume 2 reveals how these spiritual intimations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces which equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man and Hadji Murad will recognize the brilliant younger novelist, now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness.

Collected Shorter Fiction Boxed Set (2 Volumes)

Alexander Pushkin

The archetypal Romantic, killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37, Alexander Pushkin was effectively the founder of modern Russian literature. Though famous as a poet, he was equally at home in prose, and this volume includes all his short fiction, as well as unfinished sketches and fragments. Here of course are his masterpieces, 'The Queen of Spades', Pushkin's ironic take on both the supernatural and the society tale, the terse, deadpan Tales of Belkin, often humorous yet imbued with deep understanding of human nature, and his unsurpassable novella, The Captain's Daughter, which, informed by his meticulous research into the Pugachev Rebellion against Catherine the Great, is a perfect combination of folk epic, historical narrative and romance. Other works include the richly comic 'A History of the Village of Goriukhino', the imaginative historical fiction 'The Moor of Peter the Great' (based on the life of the author's own great-grandfather. Pushkin was particularly proud of his African ancestry), and 'Journey to Arzrum', the fascinating autobiographical account of his (unauthorized, and greatly displeasing to the Tsar) travels in the Caucasus at the time of the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish war.

Novels, Tales, Journeys

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking conditions, brutal punishments, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom and hope; it describes the daily life of the prison community, the feuds and betrayals, the moments of comedy, the unexpected acts of kindness. 
To avoid censorship, Dostoevsky made his protagonist a common criminal, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. As a member of the nobility he had been despised by his fellow prisoners, most of whom were peasants - an experience shared in the book by Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who has killed his wife. Like his creator, Goryanchikov undergoes a transformation over the course of his ordeal, as he discovers 'deep, strong, beautiful natures' amongst even the roughest of the convicts. Notes from a Dead House shows the prison camp as a tragedy for the inmates and a tragedy for Russia. It endures today as a profound meditation on freedom.

Notes from a Dead House

Tolstoy’s lightly fictionalized account of his own early experience ranks with Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Russian pastoral life. Peasants and soldiers, servants and aristocrats: the whole world of Tolstoy’s later fiction appears before us here in glowing colours, painted with that vivid freshness and sharp observation which were to become the mature writer’s hallmarks.

Childhood, Boyhood And Youth

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

The struggle for power between two magnetic personalities, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte to Valmont, is charted through a series of brilliant letters whose shimmering surface reveals all the more clearly the cynical amorality of their authors. These former lovers manipulate innocent victims into their elaborate schemes of seduction and revenge – the teenage Cécile, just out of her convent, her sweetheart the Chevalier Danceny, Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous married woman – with appalling success until events and feelings spiral out of control, and the main protagonists turn fatally upon each other. 
Over the years Dangerous Liaisons has gathered devotees as disparate as Marie Antoinette, Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf. It has inspired plays, films, ballets, operas and TV series, but it is the original novel that best demonstrates Laclos’ unique combination of comedy and tragedy, sentiment and brutality, farce and horror; and Laclos’ own subtle prose that conveys both psychological insight and an erotic tenderness as essential to the story as the verbal fireworks.

Dangerous Liaisons

Nikolai Gogol

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humour, and delight in human oddity and error.

Dead Souls

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life.

Collected Shorter Fiction Volume 1

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way of Dostoevsky and Kakfa. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of satire and realism that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.

Gogol Collected Tales

Guy de Maupassant

During his most productive decade, the 1880s, Maupassant wrote more than 300 stories, including 'Boule de Suif', 'The Necklace', 'The House of Madame Tellier', 'The Hand', 'The Horla' and 'Mademoiselle Fifi'. Marked by the psychological realism that he famously pioneered, the tales in this selection lead us on a tour of the human experience-lust and love, revenge and ridicule, terror and madness. Many take place in the author's native Normandy, but the settings range farther abroad as well, from Brittany and Paris to Corsica and the Mediterranean coast, and even to North Africa and India. Maupassant's remarkable range and ability to evoke an entire world in a few pages have ensured that his fiction has retained its power to entertain through generations of readers. Marjorie Laurie's accomplished translations from the 1920s have similarly stood the test of time.

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