In the Library
Under Western Eyes
Joseph Conrad, 1911
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 112k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The book Conrad was arguing with. Same city, same snow, a young man alone with one irreversible act, and an ending Conrad refused to grant.
Free in the app
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's other novel about revolutionists and the police who need them, written in London fog instead of Russian snow and even colder.
£1.99
Demons
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's own portrait of a revolutionary circle eating itself, and the source of nearly every idea Conrad here turns inside out.
£1.99
About the book
A student comes back to his room in St Petersburg and finds a man sitting in it. The man threw the bomb that killed a government minister in the snow that morning, and he has come here because Razumov is quiet and solitary and says very little, and a silent man is a blank page other people write their hopes on. Razumov has no family, no politics and no ambition beyond winning a silver medal for an essay. What he decides over the next few hours takes everything he has and gives him nothing back. Conrad wrote this as his answer to Dostoevsky, whose books he detested, and collapsed for months once it was finished. It is the most exact account of a guilty conscience in English, and the awful joke of it is the narrator: a mild old Englishman teaching languages in Geneva who keeps assuring you that he does not understand Russians, while missing nothing at all.