The first volume of the most famous French novel of the 20th century was published over a hundred years ago, in November 1913. The novel was called 'Towards Swann', and its author Marcel Proust did not yet suspect that his offspring would grow into a cycle 'In Search of Lost Time', on which the writer would work until the last hours of his life. The reader will have to evaluate the second novel...

In popular psychology, there is an opinion that, faced with a choice of two evils, a person always decides to take the path that requires the least effort. Is it so? What drives a person who chooses to become a traitor? How to live with the wrong choice?

Businessman Fedya (bottom line on the Forbes list, but enough for a yacht and a harem) is fed up with earthly pleasures: everything that beckoned in his youth and was achieved in maturity has lost its taste and meaning. A kind of mephistopheles appears on board his houseboat - a certain Damian Ulitin with an offer that the owner is unable to refuse. Damian is the founder of Fuji Experiences, a...

So here is the story of when Findus was little and disappeared. Findus and Pettson live in a red farmhouse, with a henhouse, workshop, and toolshed set among the forests, fields, and meadows of rural Sweden. Every picture tells a story, with a fascinating

The cultural dialogue between Russia and America has been going on for centuries, despite all the historical obstacles. Writers and philosophers from both countries closely followed each other's political, social, and artistic experiments.

Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal...

It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past—a...

The sugary, white Kremlin is the heart of Russia in the 2020s, which survived the Red, Gray and White Troubles, closed off from the outside world and plunged into sleep. its refined copy, but in fact it does not belong to anyone. Fifteen short stories from the collection 'Sugar Kremlin', written as if in completely different ways and about different things, add up to a picture of a ghostly,...

Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica-an unlucky creature who deeply loves him....

Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with...