Which Book Would You Read?

To celebrate the literary realism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, we’d like to ask, which book would you read?

The Double (film tie-in)

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

ISBN:9780141396187

The Double is a novel written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Double centers on a government clerk who goes mad. It deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but confident, aggressive, and extroverted, characteristics that are the polar opposites to those of the toadying “pushover” protagonist.

The motif of the novel is a doppelganger (Russian “dvoynik”), known throughout the world in various guises such as the fetch.

Price: 24,5 GEL

The Gift

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN:9780141196985

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career.  It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative:  the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write—a book very much like The Gift itself.

Price: 35 GEL

Anna Karenina

Author: Leo Tolstoy

ISBN:9780140624496

Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army officer, the elegant Count Vronsky. Desperate to find truth and meaning in her life, she rashly defies the conventions of Russian society and leaves her husband and son to live with her lover. Condemned and ostracized by her peers and prone to fits of jealousy that alienate Vronsky, Anna finds herself unable to escape an increasingly hopeless situation.

Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.

From its famous opening sentence—”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—to its stunningly tragic conclusion, this enduring tale of marriage and adultery plumbs the very depths of the human soul.

Price: 15,9 GEL