Sovereign imprint: 731 books

Madame Nashatyrin is fed up with violent behaviour and foul language emanating from abusive male guest next door. She has two grown up daughters and is concerned about their well being when complaining to the hotel-keeper. 'Either give me other apartments, or I shall leave your confounded hotel altogether!...

Between five and six in the evening. A fairly well-known man of learning is sitting in his study nervously biting his nails. 'It's positively revolting,' he says, continually looking at his watch. 'It shows the utmost disrespect for another man's time and work. In England such a person would not earn a farthing, he would die of hunger. You wait a minute, when you do come . . . .'

I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

A flock of sheep was spending the night on the broad steppe road that is called the great highway. Two shepherds were guarding it. One, a toothless old man of eighty, with a tremulous face, was lying on his stomach at the very edge of the road, leaning his elbows on the dusty leaves of a plantain;...

Tickets please... A phrase familiar to every train passenger. And every now and then there's one without a ticket with a good excuse ready. When Podtyagin, a seasoned ticket collector on a train, decides to give up drinking and work honestly at his job it sounds like a good resolution. And this very day he comes across an 'unreasonable' passenger who finds the very word 'tickets' cruel and absurd.

The wife of a former collegiate assessor walks into a bank and demands the missing pay of her dismissed husband. 'I am a weak, defenceless woman', she reasons. She repeats this endlessly, exhausts the already exhausted and gout afflicted bank manager and the rest of his staff. In the end she gets...

A local investigating magistrate unsuccessfully tries to explain that it is wrong to take nuts off the railroad track to a peasant, Grigoryev, who simply cannot see why he's to be deprived of his right to use an iron nut as a weight for his fishing line.

Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin.' Kovrin is a gifted man, well educated. Following advice of his doctor he decides to leave his busy city lifestyle and travels to recover his health in a beautiful...

Smirnov is scared of being robbed. To compensate and deter the cabman from attacking him, he blusters on in a comical way about his fighting abilities, the three revolvers he doesn’t have, and how a party of armed friends will join him soon.

Mashenka, a young girl who had only just finished her studies at a boarding school, returning from a walk to the house of the Kushkins, with whom she was living as a governess, found the household in a terrible turmoil. Mihailo, the porter who opened the door to her, was excited and red as a crab.

Young impressionable Masha sees a tragic actor Fenogenov during his benefit night and falls madly in love with him. Masha decides to run away with the actor and marry him despite her father's clear disapproval. Her father disowns her describing her husband as idle, stupid, and of no fixed home or occupation....

Unhappy in his marriage, a Moscow bank worker, Dmitri Gurov is vacationing in Yalta, Crimea, where he sees a young lady walking along the seafront with her small dog. They are soon engaged in an affair, and spend most of their time together walking and taking drives to Oreanda. Returning to Moscow...

Osmond Waymark, a struggling teacher answers a magazine advertisement, placed by Julian Casti, a half-Italian who had felt himself to be rejected by society. The two strike up a meaningful and deep friendship.

Oscar Wilde’s play Salome is a twist on the execution of John the Baptist, fuelled by motives of lust and slaughter. Wilde’s interpretation is deeply rooted in the Biblical story of Salome’s dance to please Herod and her mother’s plea for John the Baptist’s head. Wilde’s twist on the biblical story focuses on the personality of Salome and the hypersexual implications.