Max Bollinger

This Russian language audio course includes elements of Russian grammar, vocabulary and cultural content complete with dialogues and texts recorded by native Russian speakers together with English guide in every module.

Second volume in the popular Easy Russian series offering Russian language learning in easy to absorb audio format, designed specifically for English speakers. The audio course features phonetics, elements of Russian grammar, rich cultural content and native Russian speakers. It can be used as a stand-alone course or in combination with other training materials. No additional software or special equipment necessary.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky "An Honest Thief" is an 1848 short story that famously tells the tale of Emelyan Ilyitch, the tragic drunk. It begins with our narrator conversing with Astafy Ivanovich, an aged soldier and temporary lodger. An unfortunate coat theft leaves Astafy dismayed one day, and a conversation is struck up between the two, who seem to share the same dislike for thieves in general. One night, however, Astafy recounts to the narrator a story...

Nine deeply moving and exquisitely crafted tales from a master of the short story After a fortnight in Yalta, Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov has grown tired of the seaside. He is looking for a more interesting way to pass his vacation when a woman with a Pomeranian catches his eye. Gurov loathes his wife, and has spent his marriage chasing women, even though the affairs always end in disappointment. But Anna Sergeyevna will be different. For the first time...

Told in two parts, Anton Chekhov's "At Christmas Time" begins with an illiterate woman hiring a local man to write a letter wishing her daughter-from who she has heard nothing since her wedding and departure four years earlier-a merry Christmas. In the second part, the letter arrives for the daughter, whose life is not what she imagined it would be. While not a traditional story of Christmas cheer, Chekhov's "At Christmas Time" has captivated audiences...

The story presents itself as a childhood memory, when the speaker was nine and living with his father in Tula province. The boy frightened by apparitions of a wolf prowling the countryside finds refuge with one of his father's serfs, Marey.

I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by someone or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist's...

The cabman Iona's son recently died. He desperately and unsuccessfully tries to have a talk with the people he meets and tell them of how shattered he is. He ends up talking to his horse.

The charming Vanda, or, as she was described in her passport, the "Honourable Citizen Nastasya Kanavkin," found herself, on leaving the hospital, in a position she had never been in before: without a home to go to or a farthing in her pocket. What was she to do?