Kitai Gorod

In Moscow, everything has a price. Independence is harder to value.

Among the warehouses, banks, theatres and drawing rooms of Kitai Gorod, money passes from hand to hand-and changes the lives it touches. Andrei Paltusov is determined to turn intelligence and ambition into a place in the commercial world. Anna Serafimovna struggles to preserve a business, a household and her freedom. Tasya Dolgushina dreams of the stage, while the scholarly Pirozhkov watches a city he knows become a world he can scarcely afford.

Pyotr Boborykin brings these intersecting lives together in a searching portrait of Moscow: merchants seeking prestige, noble families discovering dependence, cultivated men bargaining with their consciences, and women whose practical judgement unsettles the assumptions around them. Sharp conversation, bustling streets and richly observed rooms give this novel its restless energy.

This complete English edition preserves all five books and 169 chapters. Newly prepared notes explain selected terms and foreign-language phrases, while a preface and afterword invite readers into the novel's social world and its unresolved questions of work, desire and obligation.