. В «Странной истории доктора Джекила и мистера Хайда» происходит переосмысление традиционной для романтизма и готического романа темы двойничества под углом зарождающейся научной фантастики, где зловещий двойник получает свободу действий благодаря раздвоению личности. Поглощая зелье своего собственного изготовления, доктор Джекил, добродетельный ученый, превращается в своего страшного...

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic fantasies disguises profound loneliness and estrangement from living life. A Gentle Creature and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man show how withdrawal from...

Aschenbach has always lived a life of structured routine, but he has begun to be troubled by diminishing creative inspiration from his strict writing schedule. While walking in a cemetery north of Munich, he has a dizzying vision which prompts him to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural...

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under...

Written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922—garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word robot. Mass-produced as efficient laborers to serve man, Capek’s Robots are an android product—they remember everything but think of nothing new. But the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning, and the humans they serve stop...

Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is a book full to bursting with life, both comic and tragic. At the heart of this novel about love, politics, and society, strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death, is the generational divide between the young and the old. When the young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, the nihilist Bazarov, leave St. Petersburg to visit their...

An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation...

In the early 1920s, the poet and prose writer Konstantin Vaginov was a member of Gumilev’s ‘Guild of Poets,’ followed by stints in the literary groups ‘The Islanders’ and ‘The Ring of Poets,’ and eventually the poetry section of OBERIU. He authored four books of remarkable poetry and four novels; the first of these—*Goat Song*—earned Vaginov a reputation as a subtle, witty, and highly...