The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and completed in November 1880. Dostoyevsky intended it to be the first part in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner, but he died less than four months after its publication. <p> The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate phil ...
We owe 1902s The Hound of the Baskervilles to Arthur Conan Doyles good friend Fletcher Bobbles Robinson, who took him to visit some scary English moors and prehistoric ruins, and told him marvelous local legends about escaped prisoners and a 17th-century aristocrat who fell afoul of the family dog. Doyle transmogrified the legend: generations ago, a hound of hell tore out the throat of devilish Hugo Baskerville on the moonlit moor. Poor, accurse ...
Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. Raskolnikov argues that with the pawnbrokers money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a worthless parasite. He also commits this murder to test his own hypothesis that ...
The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences is a Victorian erotic novel published anonymously in four volumes during the years 1873?1876 by William Lazenby. Henry Spencer Ashbee, bibliophile, bibliographer, merchant, and expert on the writer Cervantes, discusses this novel in one of his bibliographies of erotic literature. In addition the compilers of British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books list this book. <p> The novel is told i ...
Candide, ou lOptimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: or, Optimism (1947). It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply Op ...
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur Alle und Keinen) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the eternal recurrence of the same, the parable on the death of God, and the prophecy of the Ubermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science. <p> Described by Nie ...
Paradise Lost, an epic poem in blank verse, written by the 17th-century poet John Milton as he became blind at the end of his life, is a retelling of the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. While based on the Christian tale, the poem incorporates many topics, and spends most of its verses detailing the journey of Satan and his war on the angels. The depiction of Adam and Eve draws an elaborate panorama of their trials. This classic of Western lit ...
Titled after the biblical Leviathan, this book concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. Thomas Hobbes argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that chaos or civil war – situations identified with a state of nature and the famous motto Bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all) – coul ...
Addressing the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, Adam Smith made one of the most potent contributions to subsequent ideological history. In the West since the early-19th century he has been the patron saint of homo economicus. More recently, successive British governments have invoked his policy recommendations of free trade and laissez-faire to aid their extension of privatization and market effectiveness into areas such as health and ...
