When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive...

Written during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan is an ambitious and highly original work of political philosophy. Claiming that man's essential nature is competitive and selfish, Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign—or Leviathan—to enforce peace and the law, substituting security for the anarchic freedom he believed human beings would otherwise experience. This...

‘The Three Musketeers’ is the most famous historical adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, telling the story of the dangerous and exciting adventures of the brave Gascon d'Artagnan, the noble Athos, the cheerful Porthos, and the mysterious Aramis.

Three immortal masterpieces of world drama, translated into all major languages, belonging to the golden fund of literature of all times and peoples, and still performed on the best stages of the world today and adapted for the screen a total of 43 times (including in our country). The dramatic poem ‘Peer Gynt,’ with its whimsical combination of reality and mysticism, social satire, and...

By the time Frances Hodgson Burnett began writing ‘The Secret Garden,’ she had already built a highly successful literary career spanning several decades. She had several highly successful books to her name, the most successful of which, ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ sold hundreds of thousands of copies on both sides of the Atlantic. However, none of the author's previous works could compare in...

Even during his lifetime, Albert Camus was called the ‘Conscience of the West,’ and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for ‘his important literary work, which with clear seriousness illuminates the problems of human conscience in our time.’ Camus's rejection of cruelty and violence is evident in both his life and his works. In his essay ‘Reflections on the Guillotine,’ published when capital...

Born into a Jewish family and a communist, Anna Seghers immediately attracted the attention of the Gestapo after Hitler came to power. Her books were burned, and the writer herself was forced to emigrate to France, becoming a staunch opponent of the Nazi regime. With the outbreak of war, Seghers spent a year in Marseille waiting for a visa to Mexico. The novel ‘Transit’ is largely based on...

Pushkin's great novel in verse, ‘Eugene Onegin,’ seems simple and straightforward, but this is deceptive. In reality, its text holds many mysteries, the meaning of which often eludes the modern reader. Numerous allusions, hidden references, a multitude of people, concepts, and objects that were obvious to people of that era but are now unknown to the general public – all this does not...

Nietzsche's mature masterpiece, Beyond Good and Evil considers the origins and nature of Judeo-Christian morality; the end of philosophical dogmatism and beginning of perspectivism; the questionable virtues of science and scholarship; liberal democracy, nationalism, and women's emancipation.

When Theodore Dreiser's epic first novel stormed onto the literary scene in 1900, it was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one. Celebrated for the vibrant and gritty realism of its portrayal of city life, Sister Carrie also gave the world an unforgettable heroine—a thoroughly modern young woman who turned the traditional cautionary tale of the fallen woman on its head.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest works of fiction, written long before Homer's ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey,’ the greatest literary masterpiece of the Ancient East, which for the first time describes the myth of the Great Flood. The reader is presented with the story of the glorious deeds of the demigod king-warrior Gilgamesh (whose image is based on a real historical figure, Bilgames, the...

This collection of Japanese folk tales is translated by the renowned scholar of Japanese literature, Vera Nikolaevna Markova. It includes a preface and commentary by the translator. The tales presented in this collection tell of cunning pranks and mythical feats, of the struggle between good and evil and the triumph of justice, of the magical deeds of a wondrous wife, and of the cruel war...