Many generations of readers have become acquainted with the works of the great fabulist in early childhood and then, returning to them throughout their lives, re-read them with new, always fresh pleasure. Pushkin considered Krylov to be a truly national poet. Gogol called the fables of Krylov the 'Book of the wisdom of the people themselves.' 'Russia ... will rejoice and be proud of him,' wrote...

N.V. Gogol is the greatest Russian writer and playwright. One of the peaks of his work, the most famous of his works is considered to be the comedy 'The Examiner'. Since the first production in 1836, the play has not left the stage of theaters around the world and has served as the basis for numerous film adaptations, and the names of its characters have become common nouns. Gogol's plays...

ter, 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 shades of thoughts and experiences, and in this...

Franz Kafka created a unique art universe - semi-absurd, dreary and creepy, mesmerizing with its own uniqueness, a universe where heroes experience strange adventures, tormented in search of answers to their ghostly questions ... The reader is invited to the famous Kafka novel The Trial, perhaps the most vividly expressing incomprehensible character creativity of the author.

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...

Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards, getting drunk and becoming a general nuisance, the resourceful Svejk uses all his natural cunning and genial subterfuge to deal...

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 assigned to...

An adventurous geology professor chances upon a manuscript in which a 16th-century explorer claims to have found a route to the earth's core. Professor Lidenbrock can't resist the opportunity to investigate, and with his nephew Axel, he sets off across Iceland in the company of Hans Bjelke, a native guide. The expedition descends into an extinct volcano toward a sunless sea, where they...

Called Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours in French, Around the World in Eighty Days was published in French and English in 1873. It is one of Jules Verne’s best-known and acclaimed novels. The intrepid adventurer Phileas Fogg of London, along with his French valet Passepartout, attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club. Their...

One of the world's first bestsellers, this tragic masterpiece attained an instant and lasting success upon its 1774 publication, catapulting the author to the forefront of the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang. A burst of parodies, operas, poems, and plays based on The Sorrows of Young Werther rapidly ensued, along with the cultlike following of young romantics across Europe...

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations charts the course of orphan Pip Pirrip's life as it is transformed by a vast, mysterious inheritance. A terrifying encounter with the escaped convict Abel Magwitch in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decrepit Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella at Satis House; the sudden generosity of a mysterious...

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...