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Thanks!
The River Sparkles was just a random obscure little thing I've been listening to at the moment. You can read Nabokov or something, thankfully he wrote directly in English. My favorite work of his is probably Invitation to a Beheading, though I've started Ada recently and it's already competitive. Kuprin is great too... Of course there are tons of increadible non-Russian authors.
It takes effort (and, in my case, took years – Russians tend to develop allergy when we have Dostoyevsky etc. forced down our throats by midwitted teachers with poor understanding of the source material in school) to start appreciating «old» literature, but what's remarkable is that the impression of it being slow-paced and non-stimulating is false. Those authors were highly intelligent and it's actually very dense in information and psychological detail, just not in poorly thought-out narrative events.
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