Tales of the Uncanny (The Parapet Press Russian Library)

Newly translated and gathered together for the first time in a single volume.

Eight tales of love, fate, and the thin places between the living and the dead. A woman of mist carries a sleeping man across the night skies, asking only for his blood. A forbidden reading of Goethe wakes a passion in a married woman that cannot be put back to sleep. An officer follows a knocking no one else can hear toward the end he believes was always meant for him. A young man courts a dead actress — until she begins, gently, to court him in return.

Across these eight stories, Ivan Turgenev turns from the drawing rooms of his great novels to the country of the uncanny: dreams that repeat until they come true, a song that wakes the half-dead, an invisible dog that pads through a locked room. Here desire and dread keep the same hours, and the boundary a reasonable man trusts proves to be no boundary at all.

Quiet, exact, and steeped in dread, these tales show one of Russia's great realists at the edge of the rational — where the dead keep their appointments, and love proves stronger than the grave.