Nikolai Gogol in Russian
Gogol writes longer sentences than Chekhov and stranger ones than anybody. The difficulty is rarely the grammar — it is that the sentence is doing something absurd on purpose, and a reader has to trust that it means to.
His works in the library
Нос — The Nose
Major Kovalyov's nose leaves his face and is seen about Petersburg in the uniform of a State Councillor.
Шинель — The Overcoat
A small man and his great overcoat. The founding story of Petersburg clerkdom, and of Russian prose after it.
The other writers
Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky — what each asks of a reader. Or see which book to start with and how much Russian you need.