Inspired by Boileau’s Lutrin and illustrating the debate within European intellectual circles between the “Ancients”, who argued that all essential knowledge was to be found in classical texts, and the...

The civil servant Ivan Matveyich and his wife Elena Ivanovna are spectators of an exhibition – in a shopping arcade – of a crocodile owned by a German, when Ivan is suddenly swallowed alive by the animal...

When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed...

Set against the backdrop of the Pugachov rebellion against Catherine the Great, The Captain’s Daughter was Pushkin’s only completed novel and remains one of his most popular works. The inexperienced and...

In The Death of a Civil Servant, an administrative clerk accidentally sneezes on a hierarchical superior at the opera, which results in great embarrassment and hilarious and futile attempts at atonement. The...

Portraying the characters and events of a small Midwestern town at the end of the nineteenth century, Winesburg, Ohio is a chronological cycle of stories which reads like an episodic novel. Centring on...

As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her to assess the choices she has...

When the blind narrator, the masseur Louis Dunkel, moves into the Cornwall country house of his patient Mrs Nance, he becomes fascinated by her niece Sophie, a haughty young woman. Their resulting...

Published posthumously, The Red Notebook is an autobiographical account of the youth of the author of the seminal Romantic novel Adolphe, relating Constant’s European travels and readings, as well as his first...

The first of Roussel’s two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with...

'Atala', published in 1801, tells the tragic tale of the eponymous heroine, the mixed-race Christian daughter of a Native American chief, who saves the captured Chactas and tragically falls in love with him...

On arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl, Benedicta. She is shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman, but Ambrosius is drawn into a dangerous...