Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend’s aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What...

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. Nietzsche's utterance...

This book, based on ancient myths, tells about the long wanderings of the cunning king Odysseus, who, at the end of the Trojan War, returns home to the island of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope and son Telemachus are waiting for him. On the way, he overcomes many obstacles: the captivity of the Cyclops Polyphemus, the storm of the Aeolian winds, the treacherous strait between Scylla and Charybdis.

Having been shipwrecked, the navigator Robinson Crusoe, by chance, finds himself on a desert island off the coast of America. Having lived there all alone for 28 years, due to unexpected circumstances, he once left him on an English ship. The famous novel by the English writer Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) about extraordinary adventures Robinson Crusoe in a wonderful retelling for children by Korney...

‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ is a classic of ‘horror literature,’ a work whose popularity only increases with time. This short novel about a Victorian scientist who conducts a daring and dangerous experiment on himself, thereby unleashing his dark ‘self’ from the depths of his subconscious – the sinister villain and murderer Mr. Hyde – continues to stir minds and hearts,...

This novel, which has had a tremendous influence not only on Russian but also on world culture, has been adapted into films numerous times both in Russia and abroad. Prince Nekhlyudov, an intelligent and jaded aesthete and sybarite, is horrified to recognize in court the prostitute accused of poisoning a client as Katyusha Maslova – the pure, gentle girl he had seduced out of boredom years...

This book is highly recommended as a reference book for family reading and for use in all educational institutions. And as for government officials and other persons in positions of power, they should consider it their duty to familiarize themselves with this work, lest their exercise of power turn into an even greater misfortune for the Fatherland.

‘The collection includes three works: the novellas ‘Notes from Underground’ (1864), ‘The Eternal Husband’ (1870), and the short story ‘Bobok’ (1873). ‘Notes from Underground’ is perhaps the most prophetic of all of Dostoevsky's works. In it, the writer largely anticipated the ideas of the 20th century, including the prose of Camus and Sartre, and for the first time showed that the...

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight’s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath’s Arthurian legend, to...

Published just years before the French Revolution, Laclos's great novel of moral and emotional depravity is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. Aristocrats and ex-lovers Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded lives. While Merteuil challenges Valmont to seduce...

Sparked by Thoreau’s outrage at American slavery and the American-Mexican war, Civil Disobedience is a call for every citizen to value his conscience above his government. Within this 19th century essay, Thoreau explains government of any sort – including democracy – does not possess more wisdom or justice than its individual citizens, and that it is every citizen’s responsibility to avoid...

In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, set out from post-revolutionary France on a journey across America that would take him 9 months and cover 7,000 miles. The result was Democracy in America, a subtle and prescient analysis of the life and institutions of 19th-century America. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing deomcratic system in America...