ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The best books from Russia

Ranked by literary regard, Russian literature's best is dominated by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment — with Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Nabokov completing the top tier. This list ranks the top entries, each with difficulty and reading-time data.

A computed ranking from literary-regard scores. The stereotype about Russian novels being long is half-true — the length is real, but the difficulty scores say the prose itself is often more approachable than its reputation, and the data on each entry lets you check before committing to 1,200 pages.

1–10

  1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877, difficulty 5.6/10)
  2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866, difficulty 7.0/10)
  3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869, difficulty 5.3/10)
  4. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1904, difficulty 5.0/10)
  5. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol (1842, difficulty 6.0/10)
  6. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842, difficulty 5.5/10)
  7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955, difficulty 6.9/10)
  8. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869, difficulty 5.9/10)
  9. The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy (2006, difficulty 4.0/10)
  10. Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (1963, difficulty 7.1/10)

11–20

  1. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973, difficulty 6.3/10)
  2. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962, difficulty 3.5/10)
  3. Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin (1831, difficulty 5.3/10)
  4. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880, difficulty 6.7/10)
  5. The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862, difficulty 6.7/10)
  6. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962, difficulty 7.6/10)
  7. Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov (1899, difficulty 4.2/10)
  8. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (1886, difficulty 4.3/10)
  9. Poem Without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova (1960, difficulty 8.1/10)
  10. A Sportsman's Sketches by Ivan Turgenev (1852, difficulty 5.3/10)

21–30

  1. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864, difficulty 5.6/10)
  2. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov (1840, difficulty 4.2/10)
  3. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy (1889, difficulty 7.3/10)
  4. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1957, difficulty 5.5/10)
  5. The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin (1836, difficulty 3.3/10)
  6. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872, difficulty 6.2/10)
  7. Petersburg by Andrei Bely (1913, difficulty 8.5/10)
  8. The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (1902, difficulty 3.6/10)
  9. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (1833, difficulty 6.2/10)
  10. From Two to Five by Korney Chukovsky (1933, difficulty 3.5/10)

31–40

  1. The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol (1836, difficulty 5.1/10)
  2. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862, difficulty 5.1/10)
  3. The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin (1834, difficulty 4.6/10)
  4. Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva by Marina Tsvetaeva (1979, difficulty 5.2/10)
  5. Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Osip Mandelstam (1973, difficulty 7.4/10)
  6. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924, difficulty 6.7/10)
  7. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (1997, difficulty 5.6/10)
  8. Childhood by Leo Tolstoy (1852, difficulty 5.5/10)
  9. The Nose by Nikolai Gogol (1836, difficulty 6.0/10)
  10. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957, difficulty 5.6/10)

41–50

  1. Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol (1835, difficulty 5.4/10)
  2. And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov (1928, difficulty 4.7/10)
  3. Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy (1912, difficulty 4.7/10)
  4. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951, difficulty 6.7/10)
  5. An Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavski (1936, difficulty 5.6/10)
  6. The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1968, difficulty 5.8/10)
  7. The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy (1863, difficulty 5.9/10)
  8. The Steppe by Anton Chekhov (1888, difficulty 5.0/10)
  9. Ivanov by Anton Chekhov (1887, difficulty 5.7/10)
  10. The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1867, difficulty 7.2/10)

51–60

  1. The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky (1902, difficulty 5.7/10)
  2. Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926, difficulty 6.8/10)
  3. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov (1936, difficulty 7.6/10)
  4. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (1899, difficulty 6.3/10)
  5. Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (2013, difficulty 6.3/10)
  6. Youth by Leo Tolstoy (1857, difficulty 5.8/10)
  7. Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov (1978, difficulty 3.3/10)
  8. Moscow to the End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev (1973, difficulty 4.9/10)
  9. The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin (1915, difficulty 6.8/10)
  10. A Confession by Leo Tolstoy (1882, difficulty 3.3/10)

61–70

  1. Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925, difficulty 7.1/10)
  2. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich (1985, difficulty 2.9/10)
  3. Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1968, difficulty 7.0/10)
  4. On the Eve by Ivan Turgenev (1860, difficulty 5.3/10)
  5. Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846, difficulty 7.0/10)
  6. The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1875, difficulty 7.4/10)
  7. Rudin by Ivan Turgenev (1856, difficulty 5.1/10)
  8. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (1980, difficulty 5.9/10)
  9. The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov (1973, difficulty 5.5/10)
  10. My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen (1868, difficulty 4.3/10)

71–80

  1. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol (1832, difficulty 4.7/10)
  2. Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol (1842, difficulty 5.4/10)
  3. The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya (2000, difficulty 8.5/10)
  4. Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel (1931, difficulty 3.4/10)
  5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967, difficulty 6.2/10)
  6. Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms (1997, difficulty 7.2/10)
  7. A Boring Story by Anton Chekhov (1889, difficulty 5.9/10)
  8. Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy (1895, difficulty 3.4/10)
  9. Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich (1991, difficulty 5.0/10)
  10. The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1880, difficulty 3.4/10)

81–90

  1. Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev (1859, difficulty 4.3/10)
  2. Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (1972, difficulty 5.6/10)
  3. Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy (1898, difficulty 4.4/10)
  4. Envy by Yuri Olesha (1927, difficulty 4.4/10)
  5. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov (1859, difficulty 5.9/10)
  6. The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1870, difficulty 7.3/10)
  7. Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky (1972, difficulty 7.2/10)
  8. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov (1865, difficulty 6.7/10)
  9. The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925, difficulty 5.9/10)
  10. Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov (1892, difficulty 5.3/10)

91–100

  1. What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1863, difficulty 4.7/10)
  2. The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov (1899, difficulty 5.7/10)
  3. The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846, difficulty 5.7/10)
  4. The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov (1873, difficulty 7.4/10)
  5. August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1971, difficulty 5.8/10)
  6. The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy (1894, difficulty 3.2/10)
  7. Smoke by Ivan Turgenev (1867, difficulty 7.0/10)
  8. Virgin Soil Upturned by Mikhail Sholokhov (1932, difficulty 5.4/10)
  9. Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (1899, difficulty 5.9/10)
  10. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1848, difficulty 4.0/10)

Questions people actually ask

What are the best Russian novels?
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment lead by literary regard, with Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita the strongest twentieth-century entry. ReadingRate ranks the full list.
Should I read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky first?
By the difficulty data, Tolstoy's prose is the more approachable; Dostoevsky's difficulty is interpretive — unreliable narrators and ideas in collision. Anna Karenina is the gentler entry, Crime and Punishment the more intense one.
Are Russian novels as hard as people say?
Mostly they are long rather than hard. The difficulty dimensions show moderate prose complexity for Tolstoy with high information density; the challenge is stamina and the patronymics, not the sentences.