Russia

[Divia]

The Tsarina's Daughter by Carolly Erickson
The Romanov Bride by Robert Alexander
Rasputin's Daughter by Robert Alexander
The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
The Tsar's Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal and Tiina Nunnally
Snow Mountain by Catherine Gavin
The Summer Day is Gone by R.T. Stevens
The White Russian: A Novel by Tom Bradby
Zoya by Danielle Steel
YA: The Curse of the Romanovs by Staton Rabin

[annis]

Evelyn Anthony's Romanov trilogy:
1) Imperial Highness, about Catherine the Great's rise to become Empress of Russia
2) Curse Not the King, about the conflict between Catherine the Great and her son Peter as they fought each other for control of the Imperial throne
3) Far Flies the Eagle, about the battle between Catherine the Great's grandson Czar Alexander I and Napoleon

Edward Rutherfurd's "Russka", a novel in the "overview' multi-generational style
covering several centuries

"The White Guard" by Mikhail Bulgakov, follows the struggles of a middle-class family in St Petersburg during the civil war that followed the revolutionary events of 1917.

[Melisende]

Peter Morwood
~ Prince Ivan
~ The Firebird
~ The Golden Horde

[Ash]

Madonna of Leningrad; while I loved the concept of someone giving a tour of an empty museum by using their memory of each piece, I thought the book itself was not that well written. But many folks loved it.

Oh and its not HF, but it sure read like a novel: Nicholas and Alexander by Robert Massie. His sequel which looked at the DNA evidence, was well done but not nearly as wrenching as this one.

[Leyland]

One of my all time favorite romantic historical novels is Evelyn Anthony’s Valentina. I’ve read it a couple times and will read it again when I reclaim it from the ‘closeted keepers’ box.

Valentina is a Polish countess married to the cruel and ambitious Count Grunowski who schemes with other Polish leaders to use her to spy on the French at the point where Napoleon is planning to invade Russia. The Poles want to determine their ally, France’s, real intentions for Poland’s independent future and choose espionage to these means.

In order to coerce her into the seduction necessary for successful espionage, the Polish plotters threaten to arrest Valentina’s half-sister Alexandra, a Tatar princess. Plans go awry and both sisters are thrown into danger and adventure that involves new love when they are found out and then taken under the protection of French spies and officers. Valentina's love story is one of my favorites.

The winter retreat from Moscow is superbly covered in this novel and not every character has a happy ending. Anthony has done a terrific job.

Reviewers at Amazon have posted some good stuff, so if interested please check them out, although I believe there are major spoilers in the first one.

http://www.amazon.com/Signet-Book-Evely ... 08&sr=1-33

[Margaret]

There's a nice review of The Madonnas of Leningrad at http://www.HistoricalNovels.info/Madonn ... ngrad.html by one of my guest reviewers, Sue Gillmor.

[diamondlil]

[quote=""Ash""]Madonna of Leningrad; while I loved the concept of someone giving a tour of an empty museum by using their memory of each piece, I thought the book itself was not that well written. But many folks loved it.

[/quote]

I had issues with this book as well. It was interesting but there were some pretty big plot holes as well.

I'll post my review.

[donroc]

The Seven That Were Hanged and other stories by Andreyev
We by Zamyatin at precursor of 1984
Short stories by Isaac Babel
The Don Trilogy by Sholokov
One of my favorite long short stories/novellas is Dostoyevsky'sThe Gambler

[Cuchulainn]

If this thread is about historical fiction set in Russia, then:
Rutherfurd's Russka

If it's just about really great Russian writing, then I offer the following as a non-exhaustive, stream of consciousness list of fiction:
-Everything by Dostoevsky including Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground, the Possessed and the Idiot, but not so much White Nights

-Lermontov "A Hero of Ourt Time"

-Turgenev "Fathers and Sons" and "Rudin"

-Gogol - "Dead Souls" and the "Overcoat"

-Biely - "St. Petersburg" and "the Dramatic Symphony"

-Goncherov's "Oblomov" is horribly boring (maybe, in this respect, its the perfect marriage between subject matter and use of medium) but you kind of have to read it

-Bulgakov "The Master and Marguerite"

-Boris Pasternak: "Doctor Zchivago" (which has little, if nothing, in common with the movie)

-Tolstoi: "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace" - the reason people groan at War and Peace is because they think it's just a really long novel that a lot of people have spoken about, but fail to realize it is as brilliant, and perhaps more so, than the greatest symphony by Beethoven, in that it is able to sustain it's thesis for its entire duration, even down to the most seemingly innocuous interplay between characters. And here's a cheat - this is what War and Peace is all about (I noted the thesis on the book mark I used when I read the book):

The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. ANd the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause. In historical events, where the actions of men form the subject of observation, the most primitive conception of a cause was the will of the gods, succeeded later on by the will of those men who stand in the historical foreground - the heroes of history. But one had but to look below the surface of any historical event, to look, that is , into the movement of the whole mass of men taking part in that event, to be convinced that the will of the hero of history, so far from controlling the actions of the multitude, is continually controlled by them. It may be thought that it is a matter of no importance whether historical events are interpreted in one way or in another. But between the man who says that the peoples of the Wast marched into the East, because Napolean willed they should do so, and the man who says that the movement came to pass because it was bound to come to pass, there exists the same difference as between the men who maintained that the earth was stationary and the planets revolved about it, and the men who said that they did not know what holds the earth in its place, but they did know that there were laws controlling its motions and the motions of the other planets. Causes of historical events - there are not and cannot be, save the one cause of all causes (Cuchulainn - that is to say, God, or, in the language of Aristotle, and keeping in line with the trope, the "Prime Mover") But there are laws controlling these events; laws partly unknown, partly accessible to us. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we entirely give up looking for a cause in the will of one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the motions of the planets has only become possible since men have given up the conception of the earth being stationary. (Part Thirteen, Chapter 1, first paragraph)

[annis]

I put off reading "War and Peace" for years, thinking it would too demanding, and rather daunted by its size, though come to think of it that shouldn't have been a consideration as it took me no time at all to charge through Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"! I think it was just an excuse for intellectual laziness.
When I did get started on WAP I absolutely could not put it down. It is the most amazing book, and I always encourage people nervous about tackling it to make the effort, as it's so rewarding on many different levels. And I loved the ending - no matter how momentous the times and events which you live through, it's all about dealing with life at a personal level, and savoring it moment by moment.