Pechorin is certainly a dangerous man - Byronic in his wasted gifts, his cynicism, his predatory and flamboyant energy for any kind of action that will stave off boredom. In five linked episodes, Mikhail Lermontov builds up the portrait of a man caught in and expressing the sickness of his times.

Anna Karenina .

In this short but pungent and entirely characteristic novel, Nabokov tells the tragi-comic story of Professor Timofey Pnin - savant, emigre and linguist, happy in scholarship but disappointed in life and in love. With the lightest of touches the author sketches in a whole history from a few inconsequential episodes. A faculty party, a shipboard encounter, a series of rented rooms, give us the ...

Romance follows Ada and Van from their first childhood meeting through eight years of rapture.

Written in 1842, this comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims is one of the major works of Russian literature.

A story of a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson's awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life earns him the admiration of the tribe - but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah.