Christmas Stories

The Christmas period is an amazing time: one year gives way to another, and it seems that all sorrows will remain in the past, while the future, which reveals its secrets, will be filled with goodness and justice. This festive... atmosphere inspires faith in the possibility of miracles. Christmas stories have always been popular among readers, and many well-known authors have turned to them.
This collection includes tales and novellas by Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries — A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinksy, V. I. Dal, D. V. Grigorovich, A. P. Chekhov, I. A. Bunin, and others, united by the theme of Christmas. N. S. Leskov provided one of the most famous definitions of a Christmas story: it is "necessarily required that it be timed to the events of Christmas Eve — from Christmas to Epiphany, that it be somewhat fantastic, have some kind of moral, even if it seems to refute a harmful prejudice, and finally — that it must end cheerfully... it must be a true incident!" At the same time, the "diversity" of the plot and philosophical content of Christmas stories testifies to the absence of any strict canons: the works included in this edition demonstrate a variety of authors' approaches to the Christmas theme.