Watch Stalker

Tarkovsky's sentient ocean planet and a cosmonaut's dead wife returning; the Soviet 2001.

The icon painter through medieval Russia, the Tatar raid and a boy casting a bell.

A 12-year-old scout on the Eastern Front; Tarkovsky's first film and the dream sequences.

Tarkovsky's own memories, his mother and a burning barn; the film with no plot people watch most.

A Russian poet in Italy carries a candle across an empty pool; exile as a state of mind.

A man promises God everything to stop a nuclear war; Tarkovsky's last film, shot by Sven Nykvist.

Zamyatin's 1921 glass city of numbers; the book Orwell and Huxley both borrowed from.

Dostoevsky's tense moral descent of a guilty student (1866).