Red Spectres — Muireann Maguire

In the first decades of the twentieth century, gothic fiction flourished in Russia, despite official efforts to stamp it out. Yet few of these stories have been translated or published outside Russia. This rare collection includes eleven vintage tales by seven writers of the period: Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Grin and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; the lesser known but seminal figure Aleksandr Chayanov, whose story "Venediktov" influenced Bulgakov's Master and Margarita; and the emigres Georgy Peskov and Pavel Perov.

At a time of revolution and civil war, hardship and deprivation, the supernatural genres provided means for a number of Russian writers to explore the dark underside of the machine age and the new political order. Through the traditional gothic repertoire of ghosts, insanity, obsession, retribution and terror, Red Spectres conveys the turbulence and dissonance of life in Russia in these years.