The demonic handsome Nikolai Stavrogin and the son of home teacher Petrush Verkhovensky are simultaneously returning to the provincial city from abroad. After their arrival, strange things begin to happen: scandals, fires, killings. Political intrigues are being woven, rumors are spreading, a skeleton is found in every resident in the closet. Within a month, a quiet city turns into a hell of a funnel, most of the actors die, go crazy or run away. Dostoevsky concocts an anti-nihilistic pamphlet, and writes the gloomy and exciting tragedy of a world that has lost its harmony and meaning....
The novel about an all-consuming passion for the game. Wounded by their addictive position, the young teacher Alexei Ivanovich comes to the conclusion that money is everything, and the only way to gain it is by playing roulette. It gives a feeling of power, victory, good luck, and before this pleasure, even love recedes into the background....
In the work of this greatest of English poets of the late XIX century, poetry collections occupy a special place, it was they who brought the author worldwide fame (and at the same time the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1907). To this day, they remain an unsurpassed example of poetic creativity....
Finding himself on the brink of poverty after the death of his father, the young and largely naive Nicholas Nickleby, under the pressure of his cynical and pragmatic uncle, becomes a teacher in one of the notorious closed English schools... Even now, even the most trained reader is shocked by pictures of ruthless corporal punishment and humiliation of older students - teachers and younger students - elders. Closed schools, in which, according to most Victorian writers, forged the color of the British Empire, became a monstrous prison for the humanist Dickens, breaking children's destinies and...
A terrible anti-utopian pamphlet by Daniel Defoe, which shocked the contemporaries of the writer - and shocking even modern readers with his cold, almost ironic objectivity. The victims of the "black death" that fell upon England could be counted in the hundreds of thousands. However, the story of one person who survived the "Plague Year" affects us much more than dry numbers......
After the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote another story about adventures at sea. The result was this lesser-known work, which is a first-person account of pirate life. In response to a letter accusing him of the worst possible act, Captain Avery writes the answer, trying to justify himself. He considers it appropriate to provide a full account of the life of the captain of a pirate ship. And his letters show that he is just a romantic con man....
The satirical science fiction novel by Jonathan Swift, in which human and social vices are vividly and wittily ridiculed. The book has become a classic of moral and political satire, although its abridged alterations (and film adaptations) for children are especially popular. Shipwrecked, Lemuel Gulliver woke up thrown to an island inhabited by tiny little men, whose serious passions around growth and fashion seem ridiculous. His subsequent wanderings will lead Gulliver to Brobdingneg, the land of giants, to the philosophical guigngnms, to the vile yekha. During these journeys, Gulliver will...
A novel where the bitter fury of a realist writer is hidden under external sentimentality, for which the imperfection of human nature and the darkness of the human soul are not news - and still cause rejection. Friendship and betrayal, love and hate, the confrontation of minions and stepsons of fate - these are just a few storylines of this truly comprehensive, epoch-making novel, where the history of the country and era is reflected in the history of a small town....
“A series of reckless, but sincere articles,” as Chesterton defined “Heretics” in “Orthodoxy” (by the way, this most famous treatise was written in response to the accusation that even Chesterton criticizes different philosophies in “Heretics”, but does not give his own) . A collection of Chesterton's essays on people whom he considered modern heretics. The book is directed against the most dangerous ideas of our time. By the way, "Heretics" is the first of the famous Chesterton's apologetic treatises....
