At first glance, Marina Lavrova is an ordinary woman living an uneventful life in Moscow – she has a surgeon husband, two children with another on the way, an interfering mother-in-law and a ...

Widely held to have led the realist revolution in Russian drama, Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) liberated comedy from a tradition of sentimentality. The Government Inspector (1835), regarded as Gogol ...