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As I make my way through various on-line and brick-and-mortar book stores, I am increasingly convinced that Russian literature is woefully under-represented. One can always find War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, but to think that is all there is to it?! In all fairness, it would take a separate store chain or a huge server bank to accommodate all the works that would provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of Russian literature. However, I can’t help feeling disheartened when seeing, how much precious shelf space is dedicated to the mediocre romance novels and how little – to the works by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Tyutchev, to say nothing of Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Yesenin, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Igor Severyanin, Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoy (yes, there was more than one famous Tolstoy in Russian literature) and many others. There is an entire population of poems and stories you have in all likelihood never met.