Fiction & Literature

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill

Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf

The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a...

The Voyage Out

Virginia Woolf

Woolf began work on The Voyage Out by 1910 (perhaps as early as 1907) and had finished an early draft by 1912. The novel had a long and difficult gestation; it was not published until 1915, as it was written during a period in which Woolf was especia...

Night and Day

Virginia Woolf

Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 20 October 1919. Set in Edwardian London, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives and romantic attachments of two acquaintances, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the...

Monday or Tuesday

Virginia Woolf

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day and she is popular. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innume...

A Nobleman's Nest

Ivan Turgenev

The novel's protagonist is Fyodor Ivanych Lavretsky, a nobleman who shares many traits with Turgenev. The child of a distant, Anglophile father and a serf mother who dies when he is very young, Lavretsky is brought up at his family's country estate h...

A House of Gentlefolk

Ivan Turgenev

The novel's protagonist is Fyodor Ivanych Lavretsky, a nobleman who shares many traits with Turgenev. The child of a distant, Anglophile father and a serf mother who dies when he is very young, Lavretsky is brought up at his family's country estate h...

Virgin Soil

Ivan Turgenev

The novel centres on a depiction of some of the young people in late nineteenth century Russia who decided to reject the standard cultural mores of their time, join the Populist movement, and 'go amongst the people', living the lives of simple worker...

Rudin: A Novel

Ivan Turgenev

Rudin was written by Turgenev in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, when it became obvious to many educated Russians that reform was needed. The main debate of Turgenev's own generation was that of Slavophiles versus Westernizers. Rudin depi...

Smoke

Ivan Turgenev

The novel opens in the German bathing resort of Baden-Baden (or simply Baden) in the summer of 1862, where the young Russian Grigory Litvinov has arrived en route home to Russia to meet his fiancée Tatiana Shestov, who will soon be arriving wi...

On the Eve: A Novel

Ivan Turgenev

The story revolves around Elena Stakhova, a girl with a hypochondriac mother and an idle father, a retired guards lieutenant with a mistress. On the eve of the Crimean War, Elena is pursued by a free-spirited sculptor (Pavel Shubin) and a serious-min...