“The present volume is a conscious effort to look at and grasp the meaning of the tumultuous one hundred years of Russian and Soviet history (1872–1981) by taking an ordinary family perspective as a vantage point and reconstructing it based on the materials of a well-preserved family archive. The result is a deeply entertaining and engaging collage of personal recollections, authentic...
Three String Books

Three String Books is an imprint of Slavica Publishers devoted to translations of literary works and belles-lettres from Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia and the other successor states of the former Soviet Union.
The nineteenth century in Serbia began with two uprisings against an Ottoman overlordship that had oppressed not only the Serbs, but all of Southeastern Europe for almost four hundred years. Fired by memories of their medieval empire and determined to restore Serbia as a Christian state with European-style institutions, Serbia’s two princely families, the Karadordevices and the Obrenovices, vied with...
A book of fourteen sonnets, Pain deals with a historical event from August 1941, when the entire Serbian population of the ethnically mixed village of Miostrah in Bosnia were massacred by their Muslim neighbors in a large genocidal campaign aimed at the complete extermination of the Serbs from the Nazi Independent State of Croatia that at the time included the...
Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.
"It's where we've ended up. Not because of our own mistakes, because of politics. We weren't able to live our own lives; we had to live the way we were told to." - Maria (excerpt from book)
"It Happened on the First of September is a novel with epic sweep yet without...
Journalist, scriptwriter, and novelist Anna Starobinets—often called “Russia’s Stephen King”—is best known for her work in horror and her writing for children. In this groundbreaking memoir, Starobinets chronicles the devastating loss of her unborn son to a fatal birth defect. After her son’s death, Starobinets suffers from nightmares and panic attacks; the memoir describes her struggle to find sympathy, community,...
A bear self-begets in an ordinary Russian family’s bathroom, Pushkin accidentally survives his duel with d’Anthès, and the ill-fated family of a small boy born in prerevolutionary Russia stumbles through the 20th century all the way into the 21st, where the not-so-distant past is faded in the minds of the newest generations. But does that make the past irrelevant? Three...
“He could not have said exactly what he was hearing. A baby’s sweet babbling? A hesitant declaration of love? He does not know. But the sound moves him as if he might discover in it something eternally important, something unlike he has ever known before, something that is, at the same time, hazily familiar. When the kuy is over, his...
Yevsey Tseytlin’s Long Conversations in Anticipation of a Joyous Death came about as the result of an unusual experiment. The subject of this book is unusual and deceptively simple: two authors, one young, one old and ailing, maintain a conversation over a period of five years. The setting is the city Vilnius—known before World War II as the “Jerusalem of...
“Some texts, after I’ve written them, have woken me up in the night so that I break out in a sweat and jump out of bed.” With this confession Bohumil Hrabal concludes Murder Ballads and Other Legends, a genre-bending collection of stories published at the height of the legendary author’s fame in the 1960s. Decades after escaping the Nazis as...