Скачать книгу (размер 973 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 192) Аннотация: Presented as a series of letters between the humble copying-clerk Devushkin and a distant relative of his, the young Varenka, Poor People brings to the fore the underclass of St Petersburg, who live at the margins of society in the most appalling conditions and abject poverty. As Devushkin tries to help Varenka improve her plight by selling anything he can, he is reduced to even more desperate…
Скачать книгу (размер 809 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 160) Аннотация: Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stays on longer than intended, Rudin exerts a strong influence on the younger generation, and gradually Darya's daughter, Natalya, falls in love with him. But circumstances soon show whether Rudin has the…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 288 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 450) Аннотация: Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young…
Скачать книгу (размер 809 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 160) Аннотация: A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task — an ailing, world-weary nobody — seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own impending death, gradually becomes disillusioned with his mission, and decides to embark on a new path…
Скачать книгу (размер 605 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 120) Аннотация: Written in 1957, but only recently rediscovered in manuscript form in a New Jersey warehouse, Beat Generation bears the hallmarks of vintage Kerouac: flowing, stream-of-consciousness language, orchestrated with a jazz-like sense of adventure and rhythm. Entertaining and exuberant, and conjuring up a thrilling, smoke-filled, atmospheric New York of bygone days, the play probes the American…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 197 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 432) Аннотация: Russia's literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman — a professor of black magic — arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master — a man who has…
Скачать книгу (размер 809 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 160) Аннотация: Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection represents some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress.
Скачать книгу (размер 1 462 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 288) Аннотация: Set in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev during the chaotic winter of 1918 — 19, The White Guard, Bulgakov's first full-length novel, tells the story of a Russian-speaking family trapped in circumstances that threaten to destroy them. As in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the narrative centres on the stark contrast between the cosy domesticity of family life on the one hand, and wide-ranging and destructive…
Скачать книгу (размер 835 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 165) Аннотация: Ivan Bunin's first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in the lives of two peasant brothers — characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human — it reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land.
Скачать книгу (размер 1 064 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 210) Аннотация: Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for a married woman…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 625 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 320) Аннотация: While holidaying at a villa on the French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy American couple, meet the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Her arrival causes a stir in their social circle and exposes the cracks in their fragile marriage. As their relationship unravels, the glimpses of their troubled past emerge, and a series of disturbing events unfolds.
Скачать книгу (размер 1 625 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 320) Аннотация: This Side of Paradise charts the life of Amory Blaine, an ambitious young man loosely based on Fitzgerald himself, as he moves from his well-heeled Midwest home to study at Princeton and then starts frequenting the circles of high society as an aspiring writer. Experiencing failure and frustration in love and in his career, Blaine finds his youthful enthusiasm gradually giving way to…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 952 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 384) Аннотация: The heir to his grandfather's considerable fortune, Anthony Patch is led astray from the path to gainful employment by the temptations and distractions of the 1920s Jazz Age. His descent into dissolution and profligacy is accelerated by his marriage to the attractive but turbulent Gloria, and the couple soon discover the dangerous flip side of a life of glamour and debauchery.
Скачать книгу (размер 728 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 144) Аннотация: Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country's poultry stocks, Persikov's discovery is exploited as a means to correct the problem. As foreign agents, the state and the Soviet media all seize upon the red ray, matters get out of hand...
Скачать книгу (размер 809 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 160) Аннотация: The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase suddenly take on a bizarre life of their own. The second story, Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 798 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 550) Аннотация: A wide-ranging Russian novel dealing with the ideas of language, power, and national identity, this comic and thought-provoking work has tremendous relevance to the present day In a world a few decades from now, Russia has descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians — those who consider themselves to…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 523 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 300) Аннотация: McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an accident that «involved something falling from the sky», receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the money to re-enact, with the help of a…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 268 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 250) Аннотация: Several years after emigrating from the USSR, the author discovers the battered suitcase he had brought with him gathering dust at the back of a wardrobe. As he opens the suitcase, the seemingly undistinguished items he finds inside take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them. A poplin shirt evokes the bittersweet story of…
Скачать книгу (размер 809 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 160) Аннотация: Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection represents some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress.
Скачать книгу (размер 1 462 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 288) Аннотация: The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin). The letters, here published for…