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. Some have never had a standalone English edition at all. Others have one, made a hundred years ago, and it has been left to stand.

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 by Mira Sorokina

Kindle & Paperback · Forthcoming February 2027

For eight years a minor civil servant has been writing to a woman he has never spoken to. The letters are unsigned, or signed with initials only. Princess Vera Nikolaevna Sheina has never replied. She is married, aristocratic, entirely removed from his world. On her name day he sends her a garnet bracelet: a gold setting, five stones, one of them ringed by smaller ones that flash green in the right light. It is the last thing he will ever send her.

Her husband and her brother find out who he is. They go to see him and ask him, civilly, to stop. He agrees, and that night he takes his own life, leaving a final letter. Kuprin then gives Vera the last movement. She finds his rooms, looks at his face, goes home, and sits with Beethoven’s Second Sonata, the music he asked her in the letter to listen to. The Beethoven ends the novel. It is one of the most precise endings in Russian literature.

The Garnet Bracelet is Kuprin’s most celebrated work: a story about the kind of love that asks nothing in return and cannot be answered, told by a writer who understood that the feeling would carry the prose if the prose stayed out of its way. Most English versions of it reach the reader inside an anthology. This is its first modern standalone English edition.

This edition includes a new translation from the Russian by Mira Sorokina, an introduction by Idara Crespi, a translator’s note, and historical notes on Kuprin and on the Beethoven passage.

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The first book in Espresso Russian Classics. A novella about a love that is never returned and never withdrawn, published on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2027. The paperback follows at release.

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 →