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 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 1 462 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…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 462 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 288) Аннотация: A tale of intrigue, deception, murder and retribution, Boris Godunov charts the rise and fall of an ambitious prince who cannot avoid facing the consequences of his dark past. Based on the historical figure of the nobleman Boris Godunov, who seized power from Ivan the Terrible's successor in sixteenth-century Russia, and partly inspired by Shakespeare's Macbeth, Alexander Pushkin's 1825 play…
Скачать книгу (размер 809 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 160) Аннотация: In Bulgakov's Diaboliad, the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the First Central Depot for the Materials for Matches, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior Kalsoner, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This…
Скачать книгу (размер 565 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 112) Аннотация: In 1864, Lewis Carroll sent Alice's Adventures under Ground, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript, as a gift to Alice Liddell, the daughter of his Oxford dean. This formed the basis for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland — introducing timeless characters such as Alice, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts and the Gryphon — although it differs considerably from the later work, with the author…
Скачать книгу (размер 3 308 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 650) Аннотация: «When Sofia Behrs married Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of «War and Peace», husband and wife regularly exchanged diaries covering the years from 1862 to 1910. Sofia's life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 156 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 424) Аннотация: When the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga — Lensky's fiancee — Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own making. Eugene Onegin —…
Скачать книгу (размер 4 645 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 912) Аннотация: «Leo Tolstoy's most personal novel, Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, «moral» life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat Konstantin Levin is struggling…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 136 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 224) Аннотация: «Fathers and Children», arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 — the controversial character of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist intent on rejecting all existing traditional values and institutions, providing a trenchant critique of the established order. Turgenev's masterpiece investigates the growing nihilist…
Скачать книгу (размер 565 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 112) Аннотация: «Having crash-landed in the Sahara desert, a pilot comes across a young boy who introduces himself as the «Little Prince» and tells him the story of how he grew up on a tiny asteroid before travelling across the galaxies and coming to Earth. His encounters and discoveries, seen through childlike, innocent eyes, give rise to candid reflections on life and human nature. First published in 1943 and…