Say there gang, got any new (or not so new) Russian authors you'd like to share?

[Sequoia]

I'm a fan of Russian Lit but am looking for some new stuff to read. Thanks. (It can be non-fiction too)

[Xipe Totec]

1. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Still my favorite Russian novel.

[metapunditedgy]

3. If I may ask, what do you like about it? I loved the first 20 pages or so, but then

the rest just didn't click for me.

[Xipe Totec]

4. The theme, the structure, the interconnected stories

The biting satire of the Soviet Union and of dialectic materialism,

The way Bulgakov teases the reader by dashing expectations over and over.

It is a masterpiece.

[1957john1957]

6. Only version to read is the Grove Press version.

[SheilaT]

2. I am currently reading

Generations of Winter by Vassily Aksyonov. I'm 73 pages into it, a total of 586 pages. It's about the Revolutionary generation of Russians, and focuses on a bourgeois family. Father a physician, one son a Red Army Officer, another son a die-hard Revolutionary, daughter who is more on the fringes. It starts in 1925, and I know it will take them at least through WWII.

What I'm liking about it is that I'm right there inside that time and place, in a way I never have been before in anything else I've read about the Russian Revolution.

The other thing I like about it is the quality of the writing. I'm not enough of a lit major to properly describe exactly what makes it "Russian". It's something in the use of the language, something in the leisurely way people and events are described. But so far it does not bog down anywhere. Because I don't know Russian, and because I obviously am reading a translation, I may not be such a good judge, but it feels like an excellent translation. The flavor, so far as I can tell, of the original language is retained, but without any awkwardness in the English.

added on edit:
For what it's worth, this is simply a book I stumbled across at the library a couple of weeks ago. Had never heard of it or the author, but I'm inclined to recommend it to anyone who wants a long novel to get lost in.

[Xipe Totec]

5. Anatoli Rybakov - Children of the Arbat

Also highly recommended.

[Sequoia]

9. Dang it... I read that wonderful book years ago. But thanks because

I forgot the author. I remember the "mustard solution" that girl used. I'm sure that was the same story. Maybe the author has other books now.

[1957john1957]

7. Daniil Kharms is brilliant. But doesn't work in translation.

.

[pscot]

8. Isaac Babel is my favorite Russian

His short stories are as good as any ever written. Red Cavalry Stories, and Tales of Odessa tell the improbable story of a Jewish boy from Odessa, who grows up to ride with the Cossack cavlry as a political kommissar. He was purged by Stalin in the '30s. He's absolutely unique.

[PanoramaIsland]

10. I've long wanted to read What Is To Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky,

as a document of Russian revolutionary radicalism (it's the novel Lenin named his pamphlet after, and it inspired many radicals besides - Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, to name a few). Has anyone done so?