The brilliant Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) is celebrated for such classics as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov whose psychological examinations of the human soul had a profound effect on the 20th-century novel. His influence resonates in the works of such latter-day authors as Proust, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Kafka. Dostoyevsky also wrote many shorter works that are masterpieces in their own right.

Maxim Gorky was born in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod. After a grim childhood and some years of wandering he began to write stories and by his thirties had become famous both for fiction and plays.

He became involved in revolutionary activity against the tsarist regime in Russia and had a confused, difficult relationship with the Soviet dictatorship, partly living abroad and yet becoming the USSR's most feted and widely read author.

He died in 1936 under suspicious circumstances and Stalin and Molotov were among the bearers of his coffin. He is today most famous for his great autobiographical trilogy (of which My Childhood is the first part).

Teffi was a phenomenally popular writer in pre-revolutionary Russia - a favourite of Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. She was born in 1872 into a prominent St Petersburg family and emigrated from Bolshevik Russia in 1919. She eventually settled in Paris, where she became an important figure in the emigre literary scene, and where she lived until her death in 1952.

A master of the short form, in her lifetime Teffi published countless stories, plays and feuilletons. After her death, she was gradually forgotten, but the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about her rediscovery by Russian readers. Pushkin Press also publishes Subtly Worded, Rasputin and Other Ironies and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea.