Russian literature has an outsized reputation for difficulty — long, heavy, full of unfamiliar names — that is partly earned and partly the result of its most famous works being its most demanding. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are genuinely large books that require extended commitment. But the tradition also contains novels that are short, accessible, and as immediately gripping as anything in any language, and the difficulty reputation has scared off readers who would have found much of it available on first encounter.
The correct entry point for most readers is not Tolstoy but Dostoevsky — specifically Notes from Underground (1864), which is 120 pages and the most concentrated psychological portrait in Russian literature. The narrator — who has no name, who refers to himself only as "I" — is a retired civil servant in St. Petersburg who is profoundly alienated from the rational, self-interested world he sees around him and equally alienated from himself. His monologue is aggressive, self-contradictory, occasionally funny, and consistently disturbing: he undermines every position he takes, including the position of undermining positions. It is the first modern anti-hero and the founding document of existential fiction. Reading it is the best preparation for everything else in Dostoevsky.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is his final and greatest novel — the one that contains everything. Three brothers with radically different characters (the sensual Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan, the spiritual Alyosha), a murdered father, a trial that is also a philosophical argument about God and moral responsibility, and a subplot about a monk named Zosima whose teaching represents everything Ivan rejects. The novel runs to about 900 pages in most translations and takes approximately ten days of sustained reading. It requires patience at the beginning — the setup is slow — and the investment is absolute by the end. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (1990) is the current standard for accuracy and rhythm. The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries it as its anchor for philosophical fiction of maximum ambition.
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) is the more available of his two major novels — tighter and more personal than War and Peace, focused on two plots that are in dialogue with each other: Anna's adulterous affair and its catastrophic consequences, and Levin's struggle to find a meaningful life in rural Russia. Tolstoy builds his characters with the same documentary patience he applies to military campaigns in War and Peace, but the scale is more human. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (2000) is the best in English, restoring the colloquial energy of the original that earlier translators tended to smooth out.
Anton Chekhov's short stories are the other essential Russian tradition — entirely different from the novel in scope and method, but equally precise and arguably more influential on 20th-century fiction. Chekhov's stories are short, undramatic, and organized around revelation rather than event: something is disclosed near the end of the story that retrospectively changes the meaning of everything before it, without the story's surface changing at all. "The Lady with the Dog," "The Student," "Ward No. 6," and "The Bishop" are among the most technically perfect short stories in any language. They are available in many translations; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's collection The Complete Short Novels (2004) is a good starting point.
Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s, published 1966) is the great Soviet-era novel: a satire about the devil visiting Moscow in the 1930s, alternating with chapters set in Jerusalem during Pilate's encounter with Yeshua (a version of Jesus). Bulgakov wrote the novel knowing it could not be published in his lifetime and revised it until his death. It is funny, strange, structurally inventive, and politically serious in ways that the allegorical reading (the devil as Stalin, Moscow's literary establishment as corrupt opportunists) only partially captures. It belongs in the same company as Dostoevsky and Chekhov as a demonstration of what the Russian literary tradition, under extreme pressure, could produce.
Vladimir Nabokov sits awkwardly in the Russian tradition, since he wrote his later novels in English and considered himself a European writer who happened to have been born in Russia. Lolita (1955), written in English, is among the greatest novels in that language. Pale Fire (1962) is the most formally inventive novel in English after Ulysses. His Russian novels — The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift — are available in translation and demonstrate the same qualities: extraordinary prose, formal games conducted with absolute control, a combination of aesthetic pleasure and moral seriousness that is his signature. The Gift (1938, translated 1963) is the most accessible of the Russian-language novels.
The translation question is particularly acute for Russian literature. The Constance Garnett translations, which dominated English editions through most of the 20th century, are fluid and readable but systematically smooth out the idiosyncrasies of each writer's style — making Dostoevsky sound like Tolstoy and Tolstoy sound like Chekhov. Pevear and Volokhonsky have retranslated most of the major works and restored the specificity of each writer's voice at the cost of some fluency. For most readers, the restored specificity is worth the occasional roughness.