Traveling with the privy councilor is a very special pleasure. In September 1786, Johann Wolfgang Goethe - 37 years old and bored with his ministerial life - set off south. It goes over the Brenner Pass and to Lake Garda, via Verona to Venice, further via Bologna, Rome and Naples to Sicily. The Italian Journey is one of the most famous travelogues in literary history, but it is also a book...

Kafka's stories are not only key texts of modernity, they still amaze and fascinate readers today. The selection includes all important works, Kafka's early prose about the collection Meditation, the great stories The Judgment, The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, the later collections A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist. These texts were all put into print by Kafka himself. He was also...

'When Gregor Samsa awoke from restless dreams one morning, he found himself transformed into a monstrous vermin in his bed.' The very first sentence of Kafka's famous story suddenly conveys the irritation that has crept into the relationship to empirical reality, which determines the problematic interface between external and internal realities.

'Always shut! Always shut!' Woyzeck is humiliated and exploited by those around him. Based on historical criminal cases, Georg Büchner's drama fragment shows the social background of a murder out of jealousy. Orthographically carefully modernized edition with word explanations.

A spark is enough: when a starving boy collapses, the exploited weavers protest in front of the manufacturer's villa in Thirties. The situation escalates. Hauptmann's drama about the Silesian weavers' uprising of 1844 was a political issue - the first public performance in Berlin in 1894 was preceded by a lengthy censorship process, Kaiser Wilhelm II resigned from his box in the »Deutsches...

The open end of Hauptmann's 'thief comedy' in four acts is surprising. So much so that the audience at the world premiere on September 21, 1893 remained irritated and remained seated in the Deutsches Theater. The head of the department, Wehrhahn, a representative of the authorities, certified that the beaver fur thief, Mother Wolffen, was 'an honest person'. How could it come to this? The text...

The volume contains Kafka's most important short prose texts from the period up to 1914: Conversation with the Prayer, Conversation with the Drunk, Big Noise, the Collection Contemplation and the great stories The Judgment and In the Penal Colony.

This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.

The novel 'Oblomov' is the pinnacle of creativity of I. A. Goncharov. The writer showed an amazing and paradoxical type of Russian man, making his name a household name. The novel received a mixed response from critics. N. A. Dobroliubov saw in Oblomov a symbol of the inertia of Russia and a sign of the times.

The work of the famous English writer Jane Austen, the author of elegant and witty novels PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, MANSFIELD-PARK, EMMA, has had a significant impact on the development of English prose of the XIX-XX centuries and has been enjoying increasing popularity among readers for almost two hundred years. This publication publishes the novel SENSE AND SENSITIVITY, known worldwide for its...

It is 1918: the Russian Revolution has just ended, Ukraine is in the midst of civil war, and in Kiev, the two Turbin brothers are preparing to fight for the White Guard in the wake of their beloved mother’s death. Friends charge in from the streets amid an atmosphere of heady chaos, downing vodka, keeling over, taking baths, playing the guitar, falling in love. But the new regime is poised for...