Five books about Russia

With the upcoming Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner announcement next month, we thought it ample opportunity to draw your attention to other books in translation.

When we talk about 'State-of-the-nation' novels, we tend to mean books that are British or American, approximately the size of breezeblocks and terribly, terribly Serious – like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or George Eliot's Middlemarch. What we tend to forget is that the Russians have been doing this for ever, and usually better - and far more entertainingly - than us Anglophones.

Here is the Booktrust's list of 5 great State-of-Russia novels:

> Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls (Penguin Classics)

The mummy and daddy of all Russian social novels, Gogol's masterpiece is equals parts rambling picaresque, Dickensian social tapestry, absurdist farce and caustic satire. Chichikov, a man with neither refinement nor any noticeable scruples, travels around provincial Russia dealing in the deeds to serfs that have died, from which corrupt landowners can still derive profit. Along the way he meets a cast of country gentry, peasants, drunks, hypocrites, sadists and crooks. A gorgeous poetic epic full of low humour and disgust, Dead Souls is unlike any book written before or since.

> Andrei Bely - Petersburg (Pushkin Press)

A dizzy, impressionistic and occasionally downright demented  portrait of a city on the edge of revolution, Petersburg takes its place among the great city-novels like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz. Bely applied all the stylistic fireworks in the arsenal of Russian Symbolism to the task of putting the St Petersburg of the pre-revolutionary years onto the page - complete with moving statues, ticking bombs, free-floating paranoia, assassinations, and a mysterious masquer in a red domino costume. The result is a technicolour brainquake of a novel, full of foreboding and explosive energy.

> Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate (Vintage Classics)

Routinely lauded as the Twentieth Century's War and Peace, Life and Fate is perhaps the most unremittingly serious book on this list. Grossman's epic panorama of the Second World War, the Holocaust and Stalin's postwar campaign of antisemitism is uncompromising in its realism and often harrowing in its depiction of the brutalities of battle and genocide. His faith in the power of human love and persistence, however, is palpable on every page.

> Alexander Solzhenistyn - Cancer Ward (Vintage Classics)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn - dissident, exile, Nobel laureate and chronicler of the Gulag - needs no introduction. His denunciations of Soviet inhumanity were always best when grounded in personal detail and individual life-stories, and Cancer Ward is probably the best example of this. Oleg Kostoglotov's exile and illness, and his stay in a hospital in remote Central Asia, are based on the author's own experiences in the mid-fifties. From the restricted environment of a hospital ward and an intensely personal portrait of disease, Solzhenitsyn spins a subtle, profound and intensely moving portrait of a pathological society and the suffering humanity that inhabits it.

> Victor Pelevin - Omon Ra (Faber)

Omon Ra and its young author burst onto the Russian literary scene as Communism fell, and became objects of cult veneration in the chaotic years that followed. And rightly so: this slim book, little more than a novella, mournfully consigns the Soviet Union to history's dustbin in a riot of paranoid psychedelia, wild satire and mordant wit. Our hero, Omon (named by his alcoholic policeman father after an elite unit of Russian riot cops), dreams of escaping his drab earthbound reality as a cosmonaut in the Soviet space program. When, against all the odds, he gets his wish, he discovers that what distinguishes the Soviet space program from its American counterpart is that the Americans can afford to bring their astronauts back. Pelevin leads his helpless protagonist to the launch-pad and beyond, in a book that's both a savage indictment of a society that devoured its own children and a lament for its passing.