Are you on the hunt for the perfect holiday gift? We’ve got you covered with this year’s curated selection of books on Russian history and culture. 

These recommendations come directly from the expert guest speakers of our Second Saturday lecture series, each a renowned authority in their field. They’ve shared their own recent publications and highlighted other works by leading authors. 

From Fabergé and Russian icons to the captivating fictional characters of 19th-century St. Petersburg, this list offers something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for the ideal holiday gift or a thought-provoking read for yourself, these titles are sure to inspire.

Special Discount

We’re also excited to announce a special collaboration with Globus Books, a beloved San Francisco-based independent bookstore specializing in all things Russia. Browse and order books from their ever-changing collection online, with delivery straight to your door.

Plus, enjoy a 10% discount on all online orders through the month of December!

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Happy reading and joyful holidays!

(And, in case you missed it, check our last year’s list of book recommendations.)

Fabergé Flowers, by Marilyn Pfeifer Swezey (Harry N. Abrams, 2004)

Recommended by Marilyn Pfeifer Swezey

Beginning in the eighteenth century, flowers were an important part of Russian society and the court culture in St. Petersburg. The halls and galleries of St. Petersburg palaces were transformed into tropical conservatories for balls and official receptions with masses of fresh flowers brought in the morning on sleighs from the imperial greenhouses. Carl Fabergé was finely tuned to the cultural world around him and in addition to the famous Easter eggs, the flowers created in the Faberge workshops remain a rare legacy of Imperial St. Petersburg.

Watch: Marilyn Swezey’s lecture “The Tsar and the President: Alexander II and Abraham Lincoln”

Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, by William Craft Brumfield (Duke University Press Books, 2016)

Recommended by Dr. William Craft Brumfield

William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs in 1985. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky’s images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. This lavishly illustrated volume contains some 400 stunning full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes.

Watch: William Brumfield’s lecture “Journeys Through the Russian Empire: Photography and the Art of Survival”

Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky: Science, Religion, Philosophy, edited by Vladimir Golstein and Svetlana Evdokimova (Academic Studies Press, 2016) 

Recommended by Dr. Charles Arndt 

Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky is a collection of essays with a broad interdisciplinary focus. It includes contributions by leading Dostoevsky scholars, social scientists, scholars of religion and philosophy. The volume considers aesthetics, philosophy, theology, and science of 19th-century Russia and the West that might have informed Dostoevsky’s thought and art. The individual chapters explore Dostoevsky’s real or imaginative dialogues with aesthetic, philosophic, and scientific thought of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, revealing Dostoevsky’s forward looking thought, as it finds its echoes in modern literary theory and beyond.

Watch: Dr. Charles Arndt’s lecture “Religious Wandering in Russia”

Read also: Charles Arndt’s new book ‘Our Common People Are a Vagrant Before Anything’: Wanderer-Pilgrims in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Landscape

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Recommended by Dr. Leonid Livak

Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, the book reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

Watch: Leonid Livak’s lecture “Russian Emigration Communities after WWII”

Embroidery of All Russia, by Mary Gostelow (Mills and Boon, 1977) 

Recommended by Nadia Albertini

During two trips to Russia, M. Gostelow was permitted to see collections not usually open to the public at the time. She drew on this experience to suggest ways in which Western embroiderers could incorporate Russian themes into their own work. Beautifully illustrated in color and black and white with photographs of original examples, the book also includes detailed patterns. 

Watch: Nadia Albertini and Sophie Kurkdjian’s lecture “The Russian Embroideries of Coco Chanel”

Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, by Oleg Tarasov (Reaktion Books, 2014) 

Recommended by Dr. Joachim Pissarro 

By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike. As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design.

Watch: Joachim Pissarro’s lectures “Soviet Art: From Utopia to Dissent” and “200 Years of Russian Art”

The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, translated by Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom (Penguin Random House, 2005)

Recommended by Dr. Hilde Hoogenboom 

Catherine’s memoirs are major Enlightenment document, among the few memoirs by rulers, not to mention women rulers. They are a self-portrait in writing where she competed with other monarchs on the international European stage, notably Frederick the Great, to present herself as qualified to rule after her coup in 1762. The French philosophes argued that the ideal ruler was an honnête homme, an honorable man with a well-balanced temperament who behaved judiciously. Accordingly, how Catherine handled her new life and marriage at the Russian court in the 1740s and 1750s was as important as what actually happened.

Watch: Dr. Hilde Hoogenboom’s lecture “How Catherine Became ‘The Great’”

The Black Russian, by Vladimir Alexandrov (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013)

Recommended by Dr. Russell E. Martin

The Black Russian tells the true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a man born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. But when his father was murdered, Frederick left the South to work as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he crisscrossed Europe and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the “Sultan of Jazz.” 

Watch: Russell E. Martin’s lecture “Royal Weddings in Russia: Pageant and Piety at the Court of Russia’s Rulers” (check his book The Tsar’s Happy Occasion on the same topic) 

Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, by Gary Saul Morson (Harvard University Press, 2023) 

Recommended by Dr. Sean Griffin

Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.

Watch: Sean Griffin’s lecture “Prince Vladimir the Great”

A Smolny Album Glimpses into Life at the Imperial Educational Society of Noble Maidens, bilingual edition by Nancy Baker (editor) and Alexander Liarsky (contributor) (Academic Studies Press, 2018) 

Recommended by Dr. Nancy Kovaleff Baker

The Smolny Institute, or The Imperial Educational Society of Noble Maidens, was founded by Catherine the Great as the first state educational institution for women in Russia. An informative article drawing on primary sources outlines the history of this pioneering Institute until its dissolution in the Revolution.  Central to this volume are 40 photographs of The Smolny in an extremely rare album of the editor’s ancestor, who attended the Institute. Accompanying commentary highlights details of the photographs and brings them to life by diaries and quotations of Smolny students and other contemporaries found in St. Petersburg’s library and archives. 

Watch: Nancy Kovaleff Baker’s lecture “The Smolny Institute”

Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture, and British-Russian Relations, edited by Louise Hardiman (Brill, 2023)

Recommended by Dr. Margaret Samu

The book explores the history of British-Russian state relations from the perspective of art and material culture. This richly illustrated edition presents manifold practices of courtly gift-giving and vivid case studies of British-Russian artistic diplomacy over the centuries. It traces a visual and material history of cross-cultural dialogue that starts with an early English map of Russia made in the 16th century and ends with gifts of Faberge art objects and domestic photographs exchanged between the British royal family and the family of Tsar Nicholas II in late Imperial Russia.

Watch: Margaret Samu’s lecture “A Russian Masterpiece in Paris: Karl Briullov’s Last Day of Pompeii at the 1834 Salon”

Louise Hardiman’s lecture “Elizaveta Feodorovna and The Martha-Mary Convert”

The Talnikov Family, by Avdotya Panaeva (Columbia University Press, 2024) 

Recommended by our partners from Globus Books 

Avdotya Panaeva’s The Talnikov Family portrays a tumultuous upbringing in 1820s St. Petersburg with equal parts wit and rage. Modeled on the author’s own life before her marriage to a nobleman writer, this sensational novel joined nineteenth-century Russia’s intense debates about gender and revolution. In Fiona Bell’s vivid translation, The Talnikov Family offers readers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Russian literature and the society that shaped it.

Use promo code at checkout for a 10% discount on all online orders at Globus throughout December 2024. To get a promo code, subscribe to our mailing list here. 

The Nansen Factor, by Alexandra Grabbe (Cherry Orchard Books, 2024)

A bonus recommendation from the Russian History Museum 

Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen created a passport for stateless persons used by refugees as a valid travel document from 1922-1937. The world is all too aware of what has happened to Russia in the century since then—Lenin, Stalin, and now Putin with his iron-fist policies and invasion of Ukraine. But what about the aristocrats whose ancestors governed Russia before Communism? How did they fare in displacement? Civil War, Red Terror, and Bolshevik rule caused over one million to flee Russia. Written by the daughter of one such émigré, The Nansen Factor traces the lives of these refugees and their descendants across a century of upheaval and displacement.