Russian Love Stories offers a broad range of narrative styles, philosophical agendas, and points of view from writers who insist on making love (be it familial love or between strangers, carnal or platonic, real or imagined) central in the lives of their characters. Although all the authors represented were born in the Soviet period, each was molded by a particular set of shared practices and beliefs, and all offer a distinctive perspective on their experience. The selections are evenly divided between men and women writers and those working in Russia or abroad. This anthology is anchored in the period from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, offering the reader an insider’s view of Soviet and post-Soviet life. Yet the writer’s position – sometimes from within that time, sometimes from the perspective of a backward glance at the past – is emphatically that of an outsider.

«This delightful collection of contemporary fiction offers a unique point of view on love and lust in Russian culture. A must-read for anybody interested in all things Russian!» (Ilya Vinitsky, University of Pennsylvania)

The Editor: Nadya L. Peterson is Associate Professor of Russian at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She also teaches in the doctoral program of the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Born in Riga, Latvia, Peterson received her undergraduate degree at the University of Moscow, Russia, and her Ph.D. from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She writes about contemporary Russian prose, women’s literature, and Russian education. Peterson is a published translator and the author of a Russian language textbook and Subversive Imaginations: Fantastic Prose and the End of Soviet Literature, 1970s-1990s as well as several articles on various aspects of Russian studies.