The Russian Soul

You start with Gogol's absurdism, move through Turgenev's gentler realism, into Dostoevsky's psychological abyss, up to Tolstoy's panoramic moral vision, then Chekhov strips everything back to the human moment, Bulgakov detonates it all with satire, and Nabokov carries the whole tradition into exile and reinvents it in a foreign language. That's the arc of Russian literature in 20 works.