A series of short stories that made Turgenev famous and taught Russian literature to talk about the peasantry without falseness and simplification. "The main books of Russian literature" is a joint series of the Alpina publishing house.Prose" and the Internet project "Polka". The works that appear in it are selected by contemporary writers, critics, literary critics, and teachers. This is both an attempt to define what the Russian literary canon looks like today, and a new look at famous works: each book is accompanied by a preface by the authors of The Shelf.