I don't see a lot of Russian literature in this list, so I'll include some background on the books for fun.
I just finished up "And Quiet Flows the Don" and "The Don Flows Home to Sea" by Mikhail Sholokhov. They are novels about the life of the Cossacks in the south of Russia at the turn of the last century, the experiences of Cossack fighting units in WWI and the Russian Civil War, and the end of the Cossack life and culture under the Soviet regime. The books were written in the 1920s and 1930s, had the approval of the Soviet authorities while also winning critical acclaim in the West, became known as "the Soviet War and Peace", and won Sholokhov the Nobel Prize for literature.
To follow up, I just started the "Red Cavalry" tales by Isaac Babel. They're short stories about Babel's real-life experiences as an Jew from Odessa assigned to a cavalry unit of Cossacks invading and subjugating Poland on behalf of the new Soviet regime at the end of the Russian Civil War. Babel's stories were eventually judged anti-Soviet and he disappeared into Stalin's prison camps. No one knows exactly how or when he died in the camps.
I've been reading those books coming home from work in the evening on the subway; I work as a translator/reviser so I read the books in the original Russian language, though I also keep the English versions at hand for difficult passages.
On the way into work on the subway in the mornings I switch off between an Armenian translation of Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince" and a Georgian translation of Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." I'm very weak at Georgian and Armenian so I read children's books in those languages and have to check pretty much every sentence against the English versions.
Reading foreign language books on the subway is a good way to keep people from sitting in the seat next to me, at least until the subway becomes completely packed. People see a rumpled-looking middle-aged guy who is reading a book that has squiggly lines for an alphabet, and they steer away from me figuring I'm going to smell like stale cigarette smoke, coffee, garlic, and 7-day-old sweat.
FL