'Manuscripts don't burn' This ribald, carnivalesque satire - featuring the Devil, true love and a gun-toting cat - was written in the darkest days of the Soviet Union and became an underground sensation. A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.
One of the great achievements of 20th-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues —the culmination of a life’s work of unrelenting challenge to Soviet dogma—took Bunin’s poetic mastery of language, eventually known for its richness as "Bunin brocade," to new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades, this collection of short fiction centers around dark, erotic liaisons. Love in its many varied forms is the unifying motif in a rich range of narratives, characterized by the evocative, elegiac, elegant prose for which Bunin is rightly renowned.
Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country's poultry stocks, Persikov's discovery is exploited as a means to correct the problem. As foreign agents, the state and the Soviet media all seize upon the red ray, matters fet out of hand... Set in 1928 but written four years earlier, during Stalin's rise to power, The Fatal Eggs is both an early piece of science fiction reminiscent of H.G. Wells and a biting, brilliant satire on the consequence of the abuse of power and knowledge.