Secret Agent. In the eyes of the West

This edition allows a new look at the classic of English literature Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924), who is known to Russian readers as a marinist and author of adventure novels set in exotic countries. Conrad's personality is unique in its own way: a Pole by birth, he, not knowing English as a child, mastered it masterfully and became not only a British merchant marine captain, but then a writer whose adventurous and psychological novels prepared the emergence of European modernism. His skill was recognized even by such an aesthete as Henry James. It is no less paradoxical that the author, who declared his dislike of everything Russian (Russian literature, Russian language, Russian theological exploration, the Russian revolutionary idea), at the very height of his creativity creates two novels - "Secret Agent: A Simple History" (1907) and "In the Eye of the West" (1910), united precisely by the Russian theme, in the interpretation of which Conrad largely follows F.M. Dostoevsky. In both novels we find and intense intrigue, and colorful characters, and a deep psychological analysis of the adherents of terror, and love theme, and criticism of modern Western civilization from the position of a kind of messianism.In "The Secret Agent" - a novel that was highly appreciated by Thomas Mann - is brought out recruited by the embassy of one eastern power (meaning the Russian Empire), a man of the London "underground", forced under pressure from his "curator" from the embassy to organize the bombing of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich - for the sake of the international fight against terror to portray an attempt on the very foundations of Western civilization and science. Conrad describes in detail how the police follow the criminal's trail and what collisions arise among the police officials themselves in connection with the disclosure of this secret; he paints in rich colors portraits of anarchists, the family tragedy of the title character, who turns out to be Conrad's characteristic double: both an anti-hero and a hero "on the contrary". This exquisitely psychological novel is often considered the most striking satirical work of Conrad, it is imbued with irony and black humor.In the novel "On the look of the West" action begins in St. Petersburg (the terrorist bombing of the gendarme general de P. P., who was killed in a terrorist attack on the city of St. Petersburg).; the plot is based on a real event - the assassination of the Minister of the Interior and chief of the Gendarme Corps Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plevé on July 1528, 1904 in St. Petersburg by Yegor Sozonov, a twenty-five-year-old terrorist student from Yevno Azef's gang), and continues in Geneva, among fanatical revolutionaries-emigrants (prototypes of the protagonists are Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin, Sergei Mikhailovich Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Sofia Lvovna Perovskaya, Evno Fishel Azef (aka Yevgeny Filippovich Azef) and other Russian anarchists, nationalists, revolutionaries), where the student recruited by the police is sent from Russia.Despite the picturesque external canvas of events, the true theme of Conrad's novels - the tragedy of a loner who is overcome by mental anguish or torment of conscience, the fatal game of man with fate, the fatal loss of innocence of the spirit, the curse of gold, the crisis of positivism, the precariousness of existence, the decline of Europe, the profound confrontation between East and West, man and woman, chaos and order. Behind the superficial layers of satire, politics, naturalism, psychological sketches, something profoundly lyrical and even archetypal emerges - a dimension that can conjure up images and whole scenes from the New Testament, as well as Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky.Conrad's "Russian novels," known throughout the world, have influenced many European writers, among them André Gide, Henri Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, George Orwell, John Le Carré, Arthur Koestler, and Iñazio Silone.This edition is provided with an article on the work of Joseph Conrad, notes on the novels, a chronology of the writer's life and work, and illustrations.