Зохиолчид

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

The story as moral puzzle.

Short stories, essays, aphorisms

Isaak Babel

Brutal compression, Odessa to the front.

Short story cycles (Red Cavalry, Odessa Stories), plays, journalism, diaries

Mikhail Bulgakov

Comedy that outlasted the censor.

Novels and plays, novellas, short stories

Ivan Bunin

Russia in exile, remembered exactly.

Short stories and poetry, novellas, memoirs

Anton Chekhov

Attention without judgment; exact and humane.

Short stories and plays, novellas

Charles Dickens

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The soul on trial; ideas tested to the point of fever.

Novels and novellas, short stories, journalism

Frederick Douglass

Orator, abolitionist, architect of American conscience.

Slave narratives (three autobiographies), speeches, essays, journalism

Arthur Conan Doyle

A doctor's eye for a stranger's life.

Detective fiction (Sherlock Holmes cycle) and historical and adventure novels, science fiction (Professor Challenger), nonfiction and journalism

Nikolai Gogol

The prose poet of comedy, laughter through tears.

Short stories and a novel (prose poems), and plays

Vasily Grossman

Tolstoy in the rubble of Stalingrad.

Novels and war reportage, short stories

Ernest Hemingway

The sentence stripped to bone.

Novels and short stories, journalism, memoirs

O. Henry

The four million, turned at the last line.

Short stories — urban New York sketches and tales of the American South and West, gathered in The Four Million, Cabbages and Kings, Heart of the West, and other collections

Franz Kafka

The absurd keeps a straight face; logic bent until it laughs.

Short stories and parables, three unfinished novels, diaries and letters

Daniil Kharms

Nonsense as the only honest grammar.

Absurdist miniatures, poetry, plays, children's stories

Heinrich von Kleist

Romanticism's hardest edge.

Novellas and plays, short stories, anecdotes, essays

Katherine Mansfield

Modernism in miniature, from the antipodes.

Short stories, journals and letters, poetry

Guy de Maupassant

A cold Norman eye on appetite and ruin.

Short stories, novels, travel writing

Michel de Montaigne

The essay invented, the self examined.

Essays (the form he invented)

George Orwell

Plain prose against the lie.

Novels and essays, journalism, memoirs

Andrei Platonov

A journey with an open heart, through a country being built and unbuilt.

Novels, novellas, short stories

Edgar Allan Poe

Horror, detection, and the American dark.

Gothic tales and detective fiction, poetry, literary criticism

Bertrand Russell

Logic, liberty, and the long argument for reason.

Essays, philosophy, popular nonfiction, letters

Saki

Cruelty served with tea.

Satirical short stories, plays, novels

Robert Louis Stevenson

Adventure with a moral undertow.

Novels and short stories, travel writing, essays, poetry

Teffi

Petersburg wit, Paris exile.

Humorous short stories and feuilletons, memoirs, plays

Lev Tolstoy

Total realism, total conscience.

Novels and novellas, short stories, religious and moral essays

Ivan Turgenev

Love arriving late, history arriving early.

Sketches (A Sportsman's Sketches), novels, novellas, short stories, plays

Oscar Wilde

Moral wit, comedies in earnest.

Plays (society comedies), one novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), fairy tales, essays, poetry

Virginia Woolf

Consciousness given a sentence to live in.

Novels and essays, short stories, diaries and letters, literary criticism

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Dystopia, first.

Novels (including We), short stories, essays, plays

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Comedy of the communal apartment.

Satirical short stories, sketches, novellas