Fyodor Tyutchev once said that “Russia cannot be known by the mind” – but perhaps Moscow can be known through literature and historical surveys? A conversation on the popular listserve SEELANGS led to many experts volunteering some of their favorite works about the city of Moscow. This curated selection encompasses a vast array of resources, including novels, poems, historical studies, and films, offering a multifaceted exploration of the city across time.
Poems
Novels and Plays
- Anna Karenina
- “The Cave”
- Children of the Arbat
- Cleansing Monday
- The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl: 1932-1937
- Dim and Distant Days
- Doctor Zhivago
- A Double Life
- Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922
- In the First Circle
- First Love
- Generations of Winter
- The Grassy Street
- Happy Moscow
- Homo Zapiens
- Metro: A Novel of the Moscow Underground
- METRO 2033
- Moscow 2042
- Moscow Tales
- Moscow to the End of the Line
- Moscow-Petersburg
- Moskva Kva-Kva
- Mother
- My Childhood
- My Past and Thoughts
- A Novel Without Lies
- The Old Arbat
- Omon Ra
- Petroleum Venus
- Poor Liza
- “Postmark: Moscow”
- The Ship of Widows
- The Slynx
- The Time: Night
- Three Russian Tales of the Eighteenth Century
- The Three Sisters
- War and Peace
- What Is To Be Done?
- Woe from Wit
History and Academic Works
- The City in Late Imperial Russia
- Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861-1914
- Cultures of Contamination, Volume 14: Legacies of Pollution in Russia and the US
- The Environs of Russian Cities
- Geography of the Soviet Union
- A History of Russian Architecture
- The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture
- Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century
- The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw
- Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850-1700
- “Moscow in the 1930s”
- Moscow Diary
- Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis
- Moscow and Muscovites
- Moscow: The Russian Rome“
- The People of Moscow
- The Russians
- Russian Nature: Exploring the Environmental Consequences of Societal Change
- The Russian Road to China
- Small-Town Russia: Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities
- “St. Basil’s Cathedral” & “The Moscow Metro”
- The Transformation of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Russia
In Russian
- Алтын-Толобас
- Москва
- Няня из Москвы
- Лето Господне
- Богомолье
- Легкая голова
- Живите в Москве
Films
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