Literature

The literature collection includes over 11,000 volumes, of which around 800 are in English. These cover fiction, poetry, drama, folklore and literary criticism from the 18th century to the present.

The Russian-language literature collection extends from the Russian classics through the greatest writers of the Soviet period to contemporary popular and detective fiction. The full range of 19th century classics is covered, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. The Soviet collection includes, among others, Babel, Mayakovsky, Esenin, Gorky, Platonov, Bulgakov, Ilf and Petrov, Sholokhov, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Trifonov and Rybakov.


For native Russian speakers, there is an extensive collection of foreign literature in Russian translation, including British and American writers (Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Jack London and Mark Twain, to name a few).

There is also a good selection of literature from the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union, and a range of literary criticism.

Children's Literature


The children’s literature collection is unique in the United Kingdom. It contains treasures dating from the creativity of the early stages of the Soviet period, when many of the country's greatest writers, translators and illustrators were encouraged to participate in the development of a socialist children's literature, through to contemporary examples of the genre. The collection includes books written by Mayakovsky, Gaidar, Alexei Tolstoy, Marshak and Chukovsky, with illustrations by Bilibin, Charushin, Vasnetsov, Lebedev and many others.