Under Western Eyes (Annotated)

by Joseph Conrad

Overview

•    This edition includes the following editor's introduction: "Under Western Eyes," an essential historical novel for understanding today

Originally published in 1911, “Under Western Eyes” is a novel by Joseph Conrad that is considered Conrad’s thematic response to Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (1866). Critics consider the book one of Conrad’s finest pieces of literature and a companion to another one of his novels, “The Secret Agent.”
“Under Western Eyes” has also been interpreted as Conrad's response to his own early life; his father was a Polish independence activist and would-be revolutionary imprisoned by the Russians, but, instead of following in his father's footsteps, at the age of sixteen Conrad left his native land, only to return briefly decades later.
“Under Western Eyes” is one of the most political of all Conrad’s novels. It is simultaneously a critique of Russian absolutism and of its reactive counterpart, revolutionary terrorism.

“Under Western Eyes” tells the story of Kirylo Razumov, a Russian monarchist whose support for the Tsarist regime leads him to be recruited as a spy. When Razumov learns that an acquaintance, Victor Haldin, has assassinated a government official, he turns him in…
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9791221314182
Publisher:	ePembaBooks
Publication date:	04/05/2023
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent), he was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe.
Joseph Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of nineteenth-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and more recently Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.
Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while profoundly exploring human psychology. Appreciated early on by literary critics, his fiction and nonfiction have since been seen as almost prophetic, in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Date of Birth:

December 3, 1857

Date of Death:

August 3, 1924

Place of Birth:

Berdiczew, Podolia, Russia

Place of Death:

Bishopsbourne, Kent, England

Education:

Tutored in Switzerland. Self-taught in classical literature. Attended maritime school in Marseilles, France