lows the gripping tale of Lucas Beauchamp, a proud and defiant African-American man accused of murder. The narrative unfolds through the eyes of Charles Mallison, one of the young white boy, and his uncle Gavin Stevens, a lawyer. When Lucas is wrongfully charged with killing a white man, Charles and Gavin take it upon themselves to unravel the truth and ensure justice prevails. Their quest for...

War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as one of the central works of world literature. War and Peace is considered Tolstoy's finest literary achievement. The novel charts the history of the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. The novel was first...

In Soviet Russia in 1927, a former member of nobility, Ippolit Vorobyaninov, works as a desk clerk, until his mother-in-law reveals on her deathbed that her family jewelry had been hidden from the Bolsheviks in one of the twelve chairs from the family’s dining room set. Those chairs, along with all other personal property, had been expropriated by the government after the Russian Revolution. He...

M. Zoshchenko is one of the largest Russian writers of the 20th century, whose work goes beyond the satirical genre. This book presents Zoshchenko the comedian, Zoshchenko the philosopher, Zoshchenko the continuer of the classical traditions of Russian prose. The Blue Book is ironic and, together with the lyrical look at the history of human relations. The text of The Blue Book is published...

White Nights is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, originally published in 1848, early in the writer's career. Like many of Dostoyevsky's stories, White Nights is told in first person by a nameless narrator; the narrator is living in Saint Petersburg and suffers from loneliness. He gets to know and falls in love with a young woman, but the love remains unrequited as the woman misses her lover...

In the book, Radishchev takes an imaginary journey between Russia's two principal cities; each stop along the way reveals particular problems for the traveller through the medium of story telling. The work, often described as a Russian Uncle Tom's Cabin, is a polemical study of the problems in the Russia of Catherine the Great: serfdom, the powers of the nobility, the issues in government and...

Madame Bovary - the most famous and most perfect novel by Gustave Flaubert. Having chosen a very unassuming plot for his book, the author created a work timeless. For the past century and a half, readers have not ceased to worry about the fate of a romantic-minded woman who, marrying an ordinary man, continues to look for all-consuming love, which leads her to cheating on her husband and her...

ompleted the tragedy a few months before his death. This work was the result of the philosophical and artistic searches of the author - a poet, playwright, prose writer, the greatest scientist of his time, a man of encyclopedic knowledge. The hero of the tragedy, Dr. Johann Faust, lived in the first half of the 16th century and was known as a magician and a warlock who, having rejected modern...