A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.

DIVPolitical turmoil convulses 19th-century Russia as an assassination, government intrigue, and betrayal force a young student to come to terms with accountability and human integrity. /div

A psychological study of a young Russian student.

Reproduction of the original.

Under Western Eyes is a novel about a Russian royalist whose support for the Tsarist regime leads to his being recruited as a spy. When Kirylo Razumov learns that an acquaintance, Victor Haldin, has assassinated a government official, he turns him in.

Bomb-throwing assassins, political repression and revolt, emigre revolutionaries infiltrated by a government spy: much of Under Western Eyes is more topical than we would wish. Set in Czarist Russia and in Geneva, and told through the Western eyes of Conrad's English narrator, we are given a somber but not entirely pessimistic view of the human dilemmas which are born of oppression and violence. It is by common critical consent, one of Conrad's finest novels.