In which we announce - and print the entries - of the two winners of our fiction contest, based on a picture that appeared in our summer issue.

A short poem by Anna Akhmatova believed to be to Mikhail Lozinsky, who supported her through thick and thin.

Soviet sources praise the Bolsheviks for simplifying Russian spelling in 1918. Who was the real author of the spelling reform, and what was the Bolsheviks' actual role in making it work?

This editorial, by author (of The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas) Dmitry Chen, appeared last month on Bloomberg.com, and considers how the current crisis in Syria has its roots 13 centuries ago.

This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.

Text of an interview Pet Hawk author Dmitry Chen gave to Moscow News, upon the release of the book in Russian, in 2007.

In September 1863, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was desperate for money. The result was one of his finest works, the novel The Gambler. It would change the writer's fate in many ways.

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.

In March 1863, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin offered a biting critique of contemporary literature that is as humorous as it is significant.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin offered a humorous critique of the state of Russian literature in the 1860s. He also wrote some parody "dreadful stories," one of which is translated and reproduced here.

Whenever I read about Constance Garnett, doyenne of Russian-to-English literary translation, sitting in the garden and banging out her work with scarcely a break for reflection (“She would finish a page,” D.H. Lawrence tells us, “and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up...”), I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Extract from Anna Akhmatova's "Poem Without a Hero", in which she eulogized the year 1913.