A series from Espresso Publishing House

Espresso Russian Classics

Russian fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, newly translated into English.

English readers have a Russian shelf, and it is a short one. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky arrived first and set the terms, and for a century afterwards a Russian novel’s chance of being carried into English depended a good deal on how closely it resembled theirs. Goncharov, Leskov, Kuprin, the early Bunin: not one of them is a minor figure at home, and all of them fell on the wrong side of that comparison.

Espresso Russian Classics is built from that second shelf. Every title is translated from the Russian by Mira Sorokina, who came to the work with a particular objection: English translators have tended to hurry Russian prose along, moving it past its slow stretches and tidying away its digressions, on the assumption that a reader wants the story and not the tempo. The tempo is frequently the point. Each edition carries a full apparatus as well, an introduction, a translator’s note, and the historical notes a reader needs to meet the book on its own ground.

Titles in the Series

The Garnet Bracelet

The Garnet Bracelet Forthcoming

Гранатовый браслет  ·  Alexander Kuprin, 1911

Translated from the Russian by Mira Sorokina

Kindle & Paperback Forthcoming February 2027

For years a clerk Princess Vera Sheina has never met has written to her. On her name-day he sends her a garnet bracelet.

September on the northern shore of the Black Sea. The town house is still being repaired, so Vera has stayed on at the dacha, and her sister Anna comes out to help with the name-day guests. A parcel is left for Vera in the kitchen. Inside is a bracelet of low-grade gold covered in small garnets, with five cabochon garnets around a small green stone, and a letter signed G. S. Zh.

Her husband and her brother climb to the clerk’s rooms to hand the bracelet back and put a stop to the letters. Out of what follows, Kuprin makes a love story told from the far side, and he ends it with Vera on a garden bench while a friend plays Beethoven in the next room.

This Espresso Russian Classics edition is a new translation from the Russian by Mira Sorokina, with an Introduction by Idara Crespi, a Note on the Translation, a Note on the Text and a few endnotes.

Pre-order paperback direct: $12.99 Pre-order Kindle on Amazon

The first book in Espresso Russian Classics. A novella about a love that is never returned and never withdrawn, on sale from Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2027. The paperback ships on the same date.

More about this edition →

About Alexander Kuprin →

About the translator

Most readers outside Russia encounter Kuprin, if at all, as a minor figure in the shadow of Chekhov. Mira Sorokina would push back on that. And on the larger pattern it points to. The English-language reception of 19th- and early-20th-century Russian fiction has been shaped almost entirely by what fits on a shelf next to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the writers who don’t fit (Goncharov, Kuprin, Leskov, the early Bunin) have suffered for it. And the fitting happens in the English. A slow passage invites acceleration, a digression invites tidying, and underneath both sits an assumption that a reader wants the story and not the tempo. The slowness, she argues, is often the meaning. Mira is from Kazan, where Russian and Tatar, Orthodox and Muslim, European and Asian have coexisted for five centuries; the way a city looks at itself, she would tell you, is always a translation problem. She is the Russian literary translator for Espresso Publishing House.

Read more about the translators of Espresso Publishing House →