ireskaThe Russian Classics Library Open Nireska

Dostoevsky · Tolstoy · Chekhov · Gogol · Pushkin · Turgenev

The Russian classics,
read the way they
deserve to be read.

Nireska is a quiet reading app built for one shelf of world literature and nothing else. Verified public-domain translations, a character map that finally makes Russian names navigable, narration recorded in a real studio voice, and books that keep working when the signal doesn't.

Start reading at nireska.com See it first

Opens in any browser — Android, iPhone, tablet, desktop. Install it to your home screen if you want; there is no store to visit and nothing to download first.

6Authors
23Complete works
1,083Chapters
298Characters mapped
ireskaThe Russian Classics Library
Start here

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground

What Nireska is

A library, not a bookstore.

Every general-purpose reading app has the same problem with the Russians: they hand you a badly typeset scan with no translator named, forty characters who each answer to four names, and no idea where to start. Nireska was built for exactly that shelf. The catalogue is small on purpose — six authors, twenty-three complete works — and every one of them was checked by hand: the source edition, the translator, the chapter breaks, the nicknames.

There is no store to browse, no cart, no recommendation engine trying to sell you a thriller. You open nireska.com, answer two questions about how you like to read, and the app puts a first book in your hands.

Inside the app

Three screens, no clutter

Dark parchment, a gold rule, and the text. Everything else gets out of the way.

The reader Chapter by chapter, with a table of contents, three page themes, adjustable type and a progress bar. It reopens exactly where you stopped.
The character map Type “Rodya” and get Raskolnikov. Every nickname was checked against the actual words of the translation you are reading — not a generic list.
The book plate Real reading time and chapter count — measured from the actual text, not estimated — plus the named translator and what the book gives you.

Everything it does

Built for one kind of book

Nothing here is a generic e-reader feature wearing a Russian coat. Each of these exists because these particular novels needed it.

Complete texts, never excerpts

All twenty-three works are the full text — every chapter, every letter, every epilogue. War and Peace is all 365 chapters, both epilogues included; Anna Karenina all 239.

A character map that knows nicknames

Russian novels give one person a first name, a patronymic, a surname and three diminutives. Search any of them. Shared surnames return the whole family, not one cousin.

Narration recorded in advance, not read by a robot

Over ten hours of the free books are pre-recorded in a studio-grade neural voice — warm, properly paced, with breath between sentences. It is not the flat, mechanical read-aloud your phone falls back on. Five speeds, and pausing keeps your place to the second, not the top of the page. Recording continues across the rest of the shelf.

Offline, properly

Open a book once and it stays on your device, or download it deliberately. The app then checks that the file really landed in the cache — no empty promises at 30,000 feet.

The translator, always named

Constance Garnett, Louise and Aylmer Maude, C. J. Hogarth, Eva Martin, Isabel Hapgood. Each one verified in the header of the source file — because which translation you read changes the book.

Author timelines

A short life map for each writer — the mock execution, the Siberian camp, the duel at thirty-seven — so the novel arrives with its century attached.

A map of who influenced whom

Pushkin at the centre, everyone else radiating out. Fourteen documented connections between the six authors, each described from both sides.

Your place, kept

Reading position, type size, page theme and narration speed all survive closing the app. Reopen it tomorrow and the book is already open.

New arrivals, quietly announced

A gold dot on the bell when something joins the shelf. No email list, no push notification, no account — the app simply notices.

Why not just use a Kindle

A big store is not a good library

Kindle, Kobo and Google Play Books are excellent at what they are: shops with millions of titles. That is precisely why the free public-domain Russian editions in them are so often unreadable — nobody is responsible for any one of them. Nireska is responsible for twenty-three.

Reading the classics Nireska A general e-reader store
Getting to page one Open a link. No app store, no account, no download before you can read the first sentence. Install an app, create an account, sign in, find the title in a catalogue of millions, send it to a device.
Which translation you get Named on every book and verified against the source file. Anomalies are documented, not hidden. Free editions frequently list no translator at all, or silently mix editions between chapters.
Keeping the names straight A character map on every work, searchable by nickname, with 298 people described. Always there. X-Ray-style features exist only on some titles, on some devices, and rarely on free public-domain files.
Text quality Every file was parsed by hand: chapter breaks, epistolary letters as letters, source italics restored. Automatic conversions of scanned books, with run-together chapters and OCR debris left in place.
What you are shown Six authors, curated. The home screen is a shelf, not a storefront. A recommendation engine whose job is to sell you the next thing, forever.
Listening Studio-grade narration recorded ahead of time, included in the price — not a separate audiobook to buy. Speed control, and it resumes where you stopped. Audiobooks are sold separately, often for more than this whole library costs. The free alternative is your device's own text-to-speech: flat, mechanical, and it forgets its place.
Devices The same URL on Android, iPhone, tablet and desktop. Install to the home screen if you like. No hardware to buy. Best experience assumes their hardware, their app, their ecosystem.
Lock-in Public-domain texts, no DRM, no proprietary format, nothing that stops working if you walk away. A library that lives inside one account, in one format, on one company's terms.
Context around the book Author timelines, literary lineage, real reading times measured from the text itself. A cover, a blurb, and a star rating.

Nireska is not trying to replace your e-reader for everything you read. It is trying to be the best place in the world to read these particular books.

The shelf

Six writers, one century, one language

They knew each other, reviewed each other, quarrelled with each other and buried each other. Nireska keeps them together, with the connections between them made explicit.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov, 1872 — author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky1821 – 1881

A former political prisoner sentenced to a mock execution and four years of Siberian exile, Dostoevsky turned his study of guilt, faith and suffering into the most psychologically searching novels of the 19th century.

  • 8 works in Nireska
  • Crime and Punishment
  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • The Idiot
Colour photograph of Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, 1908 — author of Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy1828 – 1910

Born into the landed aristocracy, Tolstoy spent his last decades trying to give it all away. His novels move between ballrooms and battlefields with the same unhurried attention.

  • 7 works in Nireska
  • War and Peace
  • Anna Karenina
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Photograph of Anton Chekhov at his writing desk, 1889 — author of The Lady with the Dog and Ward No. 6
Anton Chekhov1860 – 1904

A trained physician who wrote in every spare hour, Chekhov compressed entire lives into a handful of pages, and changed what a short story was allowed to do.

  • 2 works in Nireska
  • The Lady with the Dog
  • Ward No. 6
Engraved portrait of Nikolai Gogol — author of The Overcoat and Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol1809 – 1852

Half satirist, half mystic, Gogol found the absurd hiding inside Russian bureaucracy and never quite decided whether to laugh at it or fear it.

  • 2 works in Nireska
  • The Overcoat
  • Dead Souls
Portrait of Alexander Pushkin by Orest Kiprensky, 1827 — author of Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades
Alexander Pushkin1799 – 1837

The founder of modern Russian literature, Pushkin gave the language a literary voice of its own instead of an imitation of French models — and died at thirty-seven from a wound taken in a duel.

  • 2 works in Nireska
  • Eugene Onegin
  • The Queen of Spades
Portrait of Ivan Turgenev by Ilya Repin — author of Fathers and Sons and First Love
Ivan Turgenev1818 – 1883

The first Russian novelist widely read abroad, Turgenev became the bridge his contemporaries were not. His subject was almost always the same: one generation failing to understand the next.

  • 2 works in Nireska
  • Fathers and Sons
  • First Love

Portraits are in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: Perov (Dostoevsky, 1872), Prokudin-Gorsky (Tolstoy, 1908), Kiprensky (Pushkin, 1827), Repin (Turgenev), and period photography and engraving for Chekhov and Gogol.

The catalogue

Every book in Nireska today

Twenty-three complete works, 1,083 chapters, roughly 190 hours of reading. Reading times are measured from the real word count of each text, not guessed from a page count.

Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881

  1. Notes from Underground · 186421 chapters · 3h 19m · trans. Constance Garnett
  2. Crime and Punishment · 186641 chapters · 15h 21m · trans. Constance Garnett
  3. The Gambler · 186617 chapters · 4h 34m · trans. C. J. Hogarth
  4. The Idiot · 186950 chapters · 18h 18m · trans. Eva Martin
  5. Demons · 187223 chapters · 19h 11m · trans. Constance Garnett
  6. The Brothers Karamazov · 188096 chapters · 26h 28m · trans. Constance Garnett
  7. Poor Folk · 184652 letters · 4h 06m · trans. C. J. Hogarth
  8. White Nights · 18486 chapters · 1h 32m · trans. Constance Garnett

Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910

  1. War and Peace · 1869365 chapters · 42h 33m · trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude
  2. Anna Karenina · 1877239 chapters · 26h 27m · trans. Constance Garnett
  3. The Death of Ivan Ilyich · 188612 chapters · 1h 47m · trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude
  4. Hadji Murat · 191225 chapters · 3h 29m · trans. Aylmer Maude
  5. Master and Man · 189510 chapters · 1h 27m · trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude
  6. What Men Live By · 188113 chapters · 36m · trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude
  7. How Much Land Does a Man Need? · 18869 chapters · 28m · trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude

Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904

  1. Ward No. 6 · 189219 chapters · 1h 38m · trans. Constance Garnett
  2. The Lady with the Dog · 18994 chapters · 30m · trans. Constance Garnett

Nikolai Gogol 1809 – 1852

  1. The Overcoat · 18421 chapter · 50m · trans. Claud Field
  2. Dead Souls · 184215 chapters · 10h 24m · trans. C. J. Hogarth

Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837

  1. Eugene Onegin · 18338 chapters · 2h 42m · trans. Henry Spalding, 1881
  2. The Queen of Spades · 18346 chapters · 43m · trans. Mrs. H. Sutherland Edwards

Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883

  1. First Love · 186023 chapters · 1h 51m · trans. Isabel F. Hapgood
  2. Fathers and Sons · 186228 chapters · 5h 23m · trans. Constance Garnett

What comes next

The shelf keeps growing

The library is added to over time, and everyone who has unlocked it gets every future addition at no extra cost. These are the writers and works in the public domain being prepared and considered for Nireska — the same treatment as everything already on the shelf: a verified translation, a hand-checked text, a character map.

Mikhail Lermontov — A Hero of Our Time Ivan Goncharov — Oblomov Nikolai Leskov — Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Maxim Gorky — My Childhood Leonid Andreyev — The Seven Who Were Hanged Alexander Kuprin — The Duel Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin — The Golovlyov Family Vsevolod Garshin — The Red Flower Vladimir Korolenko — The Blind Musician Alexander Ostrovsky — The Storm Yevgeny Zamyatin — We Andrei Bely — Petersburg Dostoevsky — The Adolescent, The Double Tolstoy — War and Peace, Resurrection, The Kreutzer Sonata Chekhov — The Steppe, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya Gogol — Taras Bulba, The Nose, Diary of a Madman Pushkin — The Captain's Daughter, Boris Godunov, Belkin's Tales Turgenev — Rudin, A Nest of the Gentry, On the Eve

Candidates, not promises — a work joins the catalogue only once a public-domain translation has been verified and the text checked line by line. When one lands, the bell in the app tells you.

Questions

Before you open it

What exactly is Nireska?

A reading app for Russian literature in the public domain — Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Pushkin and Turgenev — with a reader built for these particular books. It runs at nireska.com in any modern browser and can be installed to your home screen like an app.

Do I have to install anything or create an account?

No. Open nireska.com and start reading. There is no app store step, no sign-up form and no email required to get to page one. If you want it to behave like an installed app — its own icon, full screen, working offline — your browser's “Add to Home Screen” does that in one tap.

Which devices does it work on?

Android phones and tablets, iPhone and iPad, and any desktop browser. It is the same URL and the same reading position handling everywhere. There is no dedicated hardware to buy.

Are these legitimate, complete texts?

Yes. Every work is the complete text of a translation that has entered the public domain, set from the published edition rather than from a scan. The translator is named on every book and was verified on the source edition itself rather than assumed — which is why The Idiot is credited to Eva Martin and not, as most people expect, to Constance Garnett. We also record the year each translator died, because that is what puts a translation in the public domain.

Can I read without an internet connection?

Yes. A book stays available on your device after you open it once, and you can also download one deliberately before a flight. The app verifies that the file actually reached the cache before it tells you it is downloaded.

How is this different from reading the same books free on a Kindle?

The books are the same because the copyright status is the same — the difference is everything around them. Free public-domain editions in large stores routinely arrive with no translator credited, broken chapter divisions and OCR errors, and with no help whatsoever for the two things that actually make Russian novels hard: the names and the context. Nireska names the translator, fixes the text by hand, and gives every book a searchable character map, an author timeline and a map of literary influence.

Where do I start if I have never read the Russians?

Start with something short. Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog is thirty minutes, Pushkin's The Queen of Spades is forty-three, and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich is under two hours and hits harder than most novels five times its length. All three are free, and each is a different door into the same shelf.

Is the whole library available immediately?

Some works are open to everyone from the first tap, one for each author, so you can read a complete book before deciding anything. The rest of the library unlocks inside the app — including every work added in the future.

Does it have read-aloud narration? Is it a robot voice?

It has narration on every work, and on a growing part of the shelf it is not a robot voice. Over ten hours — all six free books so far — are pre-recorded in a studio-grade neural voice, with real pacing and breath between sentences, and recording continues across the rest of the library. Where a recording does not exist yet, the reader falls back to your device’s own voice so the feature never simply disappears. Either way you get five speeds, and pausing keeps your place, so resuming does not restart the chapter.

Will more books be added?

Yes, and unlocking the library once covers everything added later at no extra cost. The app shows a marker on the bell when something new arrives — no account or mailing list involved.

Start tonight

Open the first page.

Twenty-two complete works, six writers, one very quiet reader. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, nothing between you and the first sentence.

Open Nireska at nireska.com