Dmitry Bykov is a fan of American literature and is a visiting professor at Princeton University.

“This choice is personal, like any choice,” Dmitry Bykov writes on his Facebook page. The author hasn’t attempted to make a list of the best books in human history; rather, he has just chosen his favorite hundred.

Dmitry Bykov is a popular Russian writer, poet and journalist who often visits London to lecture on literature for his Direct Speech project. He is famous for his biting commentary on political and social issues in both poetry and prose.

In 2011 he launched the Grazhdanin Poet ("Citizen Poet") project with the actor Mikhail Yefremov. This was a video series narrating satirical poems on current issues in Russian politics and global affairs that was broadcast on the independent TV channel Dozhd. The videos were extremely popular on YouTube, gaining over 20 million views. Bykov and Yefremov took their poems on tour to New York, Berlin and London, as well as across Russia.

Bykov is also an award-wining fiction writer and literature professor. He is a fan of American literature and is a visiting professor at Princeton University, where he holds seminars on Russian contemporary art that cover cinema, television and performance art as well as literature.

Visit his Facebook page to see the original list in Russian.

The translated list is as follows:

Anna Akhmatova – Poem without a Hero

Vasily Aksyonov – The Burn

Leonid Andreyev – The Life of Man, The Black Masks

Pavel Antokolsky – François Villon

Augustine of Hippo – Confessions

Viktor Astafyev – The Last Respect

Isaac Babel – Red Cavalry

Honoré de Balzac – Le Père Goriot

Andrei Bely – Petersburg

Alexander Blok – Lyric Poems

Joseph Brodsky – A Part of Speech

Mikhail Bulgakov – Master and Margarita

Ivan Bunin – Dark Avenues

Vasil Bykov – The Dead Feel No Pain, To Live Till Sunrise

Truman Capote – The Grass Harp, Short Stories

Lewis Carroll – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Anton Chekhov – The Duel

G.K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday

Charles De Coster – The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel

Dante – The Divine Comedy

Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

Charles Dickens – The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Demons

Arthur Conan Doyle – The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Alexandre Dumas – La Reine Margot

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury

Johann Wolfgang Goethe – Faust

Nikolai Gogol – Dead Souls

Maxim Gorky – Mother Kemsky, Notes from My Diary

Jaroslav Hašek – The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk

Ernest Hemingway – The Fifth Column and First Forty-Nine Stories, The Old Man and the Sea

E.T.A. Hoffmann – The Night Pieces

Homer – The Odyssey

Horace – Odes

Henrik Ibsen – Peer Gynt

Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov – The Twelve Chairs, The Little Golden Calf

Tove Jansson – Comet in Moominland. The Magician's Hat. Moominpappa at Sea

James Joyce – Ulysses

Franz Kafka – The Castle

Valentin Kataev – The Grass of Oblivion

Rudyard Kipling – The Jungle Book, Poems

Alexander Kuprin – The Star of Solomon

Yury Krymov – The Tanker "Derbent"

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

Leonid Leonov – The Thief

Mikhail Lermontov – A Hero of Our Time

Osip Mandelstam – Poems, Fourth Prose

Thomas Mann – Doctor Faustus

Gabriel García Márquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude

W. Somerset Maugham – The Moon and Sixpence

Guy de Maupassant – Novellas

Daphne du Maurier – My Cousin Rachel

Vladimir Mayakovsky – About This

Herman Melville – Moby Dick

Dmitry Merezhkovsky – Peter and Alexis

Molière – Tartuffe

Yuri Nagibin – Daphne and Chloe - Eras of the Personality Cult,Libertarianism, Stagnation

Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

Nikolay Nekrasov – Women in Russian Villages

The New Testament

Flannery O'Connor – Short Stories

Bulat Okudzhava – Travels of the Dilettantes

Yury Olesha - Diaries ("Книга прощания")

Ovid – Metamorphoses

Leonid Panteleyev, Grigori Belykh – The Republic of ShKID

Boris Pasternak – Spektorsky

Victor Pelevin – The Life of Insects, Numbers

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya – The Number One

Andrei Platonov – The Epifan Locks

Edgar Allan Poe – Short Stories and Novels

Alexander Pushkin – Eugene Onegin

Erich Maria Remarque – The Night in Lisbon

Juan Rulfo – Pedro Páramo

J. D. Salinger – Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin – The History of a Town

Evgeny Schwartz – Plays

William Shakespeare – Hamlet

Alexander Sharov – Fairy Tales

Mikhail Sholokhov – And Quiet Flows the Don

Vasily Shukshin - Characters

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Cancer Ward

Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Far Rainbow, Snail on the Slope, Roadside Picnic

William Styron – Set This House on Fire

Jonathan Swift – Gulliver's Travels

Teffi – Short Stories, Memories

Alexei Tolstoy – The Adventures of Nevzorov, or IBIKUS

Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina

Yury Trifonov – Moscow Novellas

Marina Tsvetaeva – The Tale of Sonechka

Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons

Aleksandr Tvardovsky – Vasili Tyorkin

Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Yuri Tynyanov – The Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar

Mikhail Uspensky - A place where we don't find ourselves ("Там где нас нет")

Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray

Nikolay Zabolotsky – Columns, Poems

Émile Zola – The Fortune of the Rougons

Alexander Zhitinsky – Lost House

Mikhail Zoshchenko - Short Stories, Before Sunrise

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