Everyman's Library CLASSICS

Two small masterpieces in one volume. First, The Double, a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare that foreshadows Kafka and Sartre. A minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger - a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of his increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner plurality of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work. Second, The Gambler, a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky - who once gambled away his wife's wedding ring- knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.

To call Praeterita an autobiography is to tell only part of the truth. A book like no other, by oneof the greatest masters of English prose., it is less a narrative than the prismatic sotry of an extraordinary mind and a passionate heart told in terms of the author's aesthetic education. Ruskin was not merely the most important anglophone art critic and social commentator of the late nineteenth century: for his admirers - who included Proust - he was a Tolstoyan figure with the magic of an artist and the moral authority of a sage. Yet above all he was loved as a personality by friends and readers alilke, and it is the individual human qualitites which shine through the mercurial pages of Praeterita

As in many of Dickens's greatest novels, the gulf between appearance and reality drives the action. Set in the seemingly innocuous cathedral town of Cloisterham, the story rapidly darkens with a sense of impending evil. Central to the plot is John Jasper: in public he is a man of integrity and benevolence, in private he is an opium addict. And while seeming to smile on the engagement of his nephew, Edwin Drood, he is, in fact, consumed by jealousy, driven to terrify the boy's fiancée and to plot the murder of Edwin himself. Though The Mystery of Edwin Drood is one of its author's darkest books, it also bustles with a vast roster of memorable-and delightfully named-minor characters: Mrs. Billikins, the landlady; the foolish Mr. Sapsea; the domineering philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder; and the mysterious Datchery.

Several attempts have been made over the years to complete the novel and solve the mystery, but even in its unfinished state it is a gripping and haunting masterpiece.

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humour, and delight in human oddity and error.

Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labour, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.

Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only translation that counts. They are the only translators who succeed in making Dostoevsky accessible to a 21st century audience, thanks to their ruthless attention to detail at the expense of alterations which can dilute Dostoevsky's unique and flowing style of writing. The great appeal this book retains even today is in part due to Pevear and Volokhonsky, as well as to Dostoevsky himself. Furthermore, Richard Pevear's substantial introduction is essential reading. It explains the purpose of the book and the historical significance of its ideas. Dostoevsky was writing at a time when Russia had reason to be optimistic, but the warning signs in his fiction perhaps leave us clues as to why Russia still has social problems today - and why, less than 40 years after Dostoevsky's death, Russia embraced Communism and destroyed the society in which Dostoevsky had lived

One of the founding documents of Western culture and the only surviving ancient Greek trilogy, this is one of the great tragedies of all time. The three plays portray the bloody events that follow the victorious return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War.
Contains Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in search of the 'accidental family' who have dominated his dreams. The confrontation with them does not turn out quite as he imagined it. This relatively late novel, written in the last decade of the author's life, nevertheless captures the exuberance and embarrassments, the bliss and bale of adolescence in all its volatility and uncertainty.

When the eminent naturalist Charles Darwin returned from South America on board the H.M.S Beagle in 1836, he brought with him the notes and evidence which would form the basis of his landmark theory of evolution of species by a process of natural selection. This theory, published as The Origin of Species in 1859, is the basis of modern biology and the concept of biodiversity. It also sparked a fierce scientific, religious and philosophical debate which still continues today.

Describing his collection of Essays as ‘a book consubstantial with its author’, Montaigne identified both the power and the charm of a work which introduces us to one of the most attractive figures in European literature. A humanist, a sceptic, an acute observer of himself and others, he reflects the great themes of existence through the prism of his own self-consciousness. Apparent in every line he wrote, his virtues of tolerance, moderation and disinterested inquiry amount to an undeclared manifesto for the Enlightenment, whose prophet he is. This complete edition of his works supplements the Essays with travel diaries and letters, thereby completing the portrait of a true Renaissance man.

Possibly the most colourful figure in the history of Western music, Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was certainly the most eloquent. His autobiography is among the greatest ever written. Larger than life – like his massive works – Berlioz was a seminal figure in the Romantic movement and his book is both a personal testament and an account of his role in that movement. It tells the story of his romance with Harriet Smithson –with whom he fell in love when he saw her playing the part of Ophelia – and his even more passionate affairs with Shakespeare, Scott and Byron.

Familiar with all the great figures of the age – Liszt, Wagner, Balzac, Delacroix, Weber, Rossini – Berlioz paints brilliant and often mordant portraits of them in a style which is one of the glories of French prose. Above all, this is the intimate and detailed self-revelation of a complex and attractive man, driven by his creative urges to a position of lonely eminence.

The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz were translated some years ago by David Cairns now famous himself as the composer’s finest biographer. For the Everyman edition he has completely revised the text, and the extensive notes which accompany it, to take account of the latest research.

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky’s most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, returns to Russia from a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to collect an inheritance. Before he has even arrived home he becomes involved with Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the fascinating Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. But this is only the main thread of a rich and complex book in which a dazzling host of characters, from generals to street urchins, present the picture of an entire society on the verge of dissolution. A tragicomic masterpiece.

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’sJournal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Johnson offers a magisterial account of what was then a remote and rugged land, while Boswell throws further light on the friend and mentor whom he immortalized in his biography. Together, they make up a brilliant portrait of two very different and very remarkable men exploring a feudal world which was soon to pass away for ever.

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life.

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook.

Volume 2 reveals how these spiritual intimations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces which equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power.

Readers of The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man and Hadji Murad will recognize the brilliant younger novelist, now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness.

In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.”

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).