Arkady Kirsanov returns from university to his father's country estate with his friend Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist. Bazarov's rejection of art, romance and authority clashes with the older generation, and a stay with the widowed Anna Odintsova and a duel force both friends to test the ideas they preach.
Prince Myshkin returns to St Petersburg from a Swiss clinic, innocent of society's games. His compassion draws him into the tangled lives of the proud Nastasya Filippovna and the passionate Rogozhin, and the three are pulled toward ruin.
Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town and charms its officials and landowners. He has come to buy serfs who have died but are still listed on the tax rolls, and his odd scheme draws him into the vanity and corruption of the society around him.
A country doctor's wife dreams of romance and a grander life than her dull provincial marriage offers. She takes lovers and spends beyond her means, chasing a happiness that keeps slipping away. A sharply observed novel about desire, debt and disillusion.
In the imperial capital of 1905, a student is drawn into a plot to kill a high official who is his own father. Over a few feverish days, the city's streets and the characters' minds come apart.
Pechorin is a clever, restless officer serving in the Caucasus, bored by everything and unable to value what he wins. In five linked tales he manipulates the people drawn to him, a princess, a smuggler, an old comrade, and coolly explains his own cruelty. A portrait of a gifted man who has nothing left to want.
A bored young dandy inherits a country estate and turns down the earnest love of his bookish neighbour, Tatyana. Years later they meet again in St Petersburg society, and their positions are reversed.
Anna Karenina, married to a senior official, meets the young officer Vronsky at a Moscow railway station, and the attraction between them overturns her settled life. In parallel, the landowner Levin wrestles with faith, work and his courtship of Kitty. The novel follows both households and the price society demands.
A poor student in St Petersburg, convinced that great men stand above the law, murders a pawnbroker and her sister. What follows is less a chase than a slow unravelling, as guilt, a detective's needling and a young woman's faith close in on him.
Port and Kit Moresby travel from New York to North Africa with their friend Tunner, hoping the trip will mend their marriage. As they move deeper into the Sahara, the heat, illness and emptiness of the landscape strip away the habits that held them together, and each of them drifts toward a different kind of loss.
Across the years of Napoleon's campaigns, the lives of several Russian families intertwine. Pierre searches for a purpose, Prince Andrei for glory and love, and Natasha grows up amid courtship and loss, while the war moves steadily toward the burning of Moscow.
Becky Sharp, clever and poor, leaves school determined to climb London society by any means available. Beside her is her gentle friend Amelia, whose love for a vain soldier leads her toward ruin. The novel follows the two women through marriages, debts and reversals, always with an ironic eye on ambition.
On the Don steppe, a Cossack family is torn apart by war and revolution. Grigory's love for another man's wife and his shifting loyalties carry him through the First World War and the civil war that follows.
In the glass city of OneState, citizens live by a strict timetable and are known only by numbers. When the mathematician D-503 begins to keep a private journal, a woman named I-330 draws him into a movement that wants to tear down the walls of the ordered world.
Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant and prisoner of war in Dresden, becomes unstuck in time, living his life out of order among moments in the war and on another planet. His flat, looping account turns a firebombing and a life's small cruelties into a dark joke about fate.
A middle-aged loner who feels half man and half wolf drifts through a city he despises, until a chance encounter leads him to a strange magic theatre. There he confronts the many selves inside him. A novel about alienation, desire and finding one's way back to life.
After a nuclear war, monks in a desert abbey preserve the few books that survive, including a blueprint signed by a martyred engineer. Across centuries they copy, guard and argue over the relics while civilisation slowly rebuilds and then repeats its old mistakes.
A young man raised to believe he is one of the elect is drawn into a double life by a stranger who may be a demon, a double, or a delusion. His own account of his crimes is set against an editor's, and the two versions refuse to agree.
Keiko has worked at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years and is content there, until the people around her begin pressuring her to want a normal life. Deadpan and sharp, the novel follows her attempt to perform the life others expect, by staging a relationship she does not want.
An inventor builds a machine that carries him far into the future. He finds a gentle people living above ground and a sinister race below, and slowly learns what became of humanity. A short, influential tale of time travel and a dark vision of the end.
A doctor and poet grows up in late imperial Moscow and lives through revolution and civil war. Between his wife and Lara, whose path keeps crossing his, he tries to hold on to ordinary life and to his writing.
A young German soldier boards a troop train bound for the Eastern Front. Convinced he will die within days, he watches the passengers and countryside pass by, and begins to wonder whether fate can be resisted.
In a future where citizens are engineered for contentment and kept calm with a drug called soma, Bernard Marx and the Savage John discover the cost of a stable, pleasure-driven society. John's arrival from a reservation exposes the emptiness behind the World State's comfort.
A boy fleeing his abusive father and a man escaping slavery travel together down the Mississippi on a raft. Their friendship grows as they meet swindlers and feuds along the way, and Huck must decide what he believes. A comic, humane adventure about freedom and conscience.
Start with “Fathers and Sons”, “The Idiot”, “Dead Souls”: they are the closest to “Oblomov” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Oblomov” these are Russian Empire, Melancholic, Satire), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Convenience Store Woman”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
