'Rarely, to such an extent, in such complete equilibrium, were two hard-to-combine elements: sympathy for humanity and artistic feeling,' F.I. Tyutchev admired the Notes of the Hunter. In Notes of the Hunter, Turgenev recreates the thin, colorful material of national life: poetry and prose, light and shadows are intertwined here in unique, bizarre images, and nature turns out to be a necessary...

Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin is a poet, prose writer, translator, journalist, publisher, the most prominent representative of sentimentalism in Russian literature, a reformer of the Russian language and a major historiographer. His work became a school for the next generation of Russian writers. It was he who found new words and techniques for revealing the inner world of man, the subtlest...

Composed around 730 B.C., Homer’s Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion. From the explosive confrontation between Achilles, the greatest warrior at Troy, and Agamemnon, the inept leader of the Greeks, through to its tragic conclusion, The Iliad explores the...

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so he may find new blood and spread undead curse, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Dracula has been...

After 18 years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are...

The story 'The Old Man and the Sea' is one of the most famous and beloved by the readers of Hemingway's works. It brought the author the Pulitzer Prize, and also played an important role in awarding him the title of Nobel laureate. This is a story about 'tragic stoicism' and courage, about how before in the face of ruthless fate and loneliness, a person, even losing, must maintain dignity....

The Good Soldier Schweik is the story beginning in Prague with news of the assassination in Sarajevo that precipitates World War I. Schweik displays such enthusiasm about faithfully serving the Austrian Emperor in battle that no one can decide whether he is merely an imbecile or is craftily undermining the war effort. However, he is arrested by a member of the secret police after making some...

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are probably the most famous boys in the whole wide world - kind and sincere, savvy and reckless, charming, like childhood itself, easily find the key to any heart. This is how Tom and Huck created the pen - or rather, the typewriter - of the great American writer Mark Twain. We invite our readers to plunge into a wonderful world full of adventures, mysteries...

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner's towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize...

Mark Twain's first historical novel, The Prince and the Pauper, is a classic adventure of mistaken identity that champions social justice. Set in 1547, it tells the story of two young boys who were born on the same day and are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive, alcoholic father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London, and Edward VI of England, son of...

The pages of the book will revive the St. Petersburg streets of the 19th century, you will get acquainted with the customs of the inhabitants of St. Petersburg. And quite in the spirit of Nikolai Gogol, you will learn about the life of bureaucratic Petersburg and the adventures of Mr. Golyadkin. See the big picture of an ideal humanity and moral decline among people.

The young companion of a capricious elderly American woman becomes the wife of the imposing English aristocrat Maximilian de Winter, tormented by secret sadness, and arrives with him at his Manderley family estate. In a huge gloomy mansion, the people, the walls, and, it seems, the air itself remind the new owner of her deceased predecessor, the beautiful and sophisticated Rebecca de Winter....