"It was I who removed de P- this morning." With these chilling words Victor Haldin shatters the solitary, industrious existence of Razumov, his fellow student at St Petersburg University. Razumov aims to overcome the denial of his noble birth by a brilliant career in the tsarist bureaucracy created by Peter the Great. But in pre-revolutionary Russia Peter's legacy is autocracy tempered by assassination; and Razumov is soon caught in a tragic web with Haldin's trustful sister Natalia in spy-haunted Geneva. Their fateful story is told by an elderly Englishman who loves Natalia but plays his part of a 'dense Westerner' to the end. The central character, Razumov, is the most dislikable anti-hero in all fiction, so it's an amazing feat of empathy by which Conrad brings us to care about his fate. Conrad's genius as a narrator is his ability to place himself and the reader in a realm of detachment, so that every event and every character can be observed from several angles at once. The "unreliable narrator" is child's play for Conrad. The Russia portrayed in "Under Western Eyes" is a land of cynicism and naivete intertwined - hyper-emotionalism and psychological repression in equal measure – omni-competent surveillance and hopeless myopia - ruthless bureaucracy and utter disorganization - a land in short of oxymoronic self-destruction. This is NOT, however, the Russia of Communism! The novel was written in 1911! This is Russia as it existed under the Tsarist autocracy, and everything about it clamors for revolution. It's interesting to compare Conrad's portrayal of the old regime with the nostalgic and idealized version served up by Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir "Speak, Memory." Nabokov wrote far more beautiful sentences, but Conrad saw deeper. The horror for post-Stalinist readers, in Conrad's depiction of the pre-revolutionary state-of-things is that we KNOW that change will not change much, that autocratic, arbitrary repression will be replaced by...more of the same. Conrad wrote two novels aground, away from the sea – this one and The Secret Agent. They are among his best. Under Western Eyes is a book to be read slowly and observantly; the effort will be rewarded.
Product details
- Paperback | 24 pages
- 15 Jan 2010
- Hachette
- Paris, France
- French
- 2011176255
- 9782011176257
Download Tous lecteurs! : Des betes bien etranges (2011176255).pdf, available at ebookdownloadfree.co for free.
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