After disappearing from the Deputy Inspector's face, his nose shows up around town before returning to its proper place.

    Alexey Tolstoy (who was not related to the author of War and Peace) began to study the character of his hero, Peter the First, in 1917. When he died almost thirty years later, Tolstoy was still working on his masterpiece, this huge historical canvas which gives brilliant life and meaning to a crucial period in Russian history. Tolstoy reanimates the past by a succession of character creations which range from the serf, Ivan Brodkin, to Peter's sinister and opportunistic favorite, Alexander Menshikoff; from the old Boyars shorn of their beards and their prerogatives to the foreign captains of the new Russian navy. Here in these pages are the beautiful Anna Mons, Peter's first mistress; his wife Eudoxia, whom he never loved; and the peasant girl who eventually was to be crowned Empress Catherine the First. We see these men and women moving across a tapestry of battles abroad, and amid the dark, opulent luxury of the great families and the Imperial Court. In Tolstoy's moving crowded pages we see the emergence of Russia, thrust forward by Peter's inexorable will, from a backward medieval state to her final position as one of the great powers of Europe. Here are magnificent portraits, the fruits of years of historical research, of Peter's principal opponents: August, Elector of Saxony, indefatigable in his amusements, and King Charles XII of Sweden, a great military genius, flawed by passion and indulgence. But the true hero of Tolstoy's epic is Peter himself. We see him grow to be a man---awkward, suspicious, prone to spasms of cowardice, but always driving, sometimes provoked almost to madness, to free his country from the chains of backwardness and superstition to take her place as an equal among the nations of the west. And in the last analysis it is this greatness and originality of character in its hero which gives the stamp of greatness to the book itself. Alexey Tolstoy was born in 1883. In 1918 he published his first full length work, Nikita's Childhood. In 1919 he fled from the Bolshevik government and settled in Paris. In 1922 he asked for and received permission to return home. For the next twenty-four years he lived in Russia, until his death in 1946.

    Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' became an important part of the 'Sturm und Drang movement, and greatly influenced later 'Romanticism'. The work is semi-autobiographical - in 1772, two years before the novel was published, Goethe had passed through a similar tempestuous period, when he lost his heart to Charlotte Buff, who was at that time engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner.

    Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for any good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.

    One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.

    The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."

    But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love.In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherworldly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

    Their heart-breaking stories make Dr Zhivago one of the greatest romantic books, and films, of the century.

    As with all of Wilde's short stories it embodies strong moral values and is told with an effervescence akin to that of the 1001 nights. It is the tale of a lovestruck student who must provide his lover with a red rose in order to win her heart. A nightingale overhearing his lament from a solitary oak tree is filled with sorrow and admiration all at once, and decides to help the poor young man.She journeys through the night seeking the perfect red rose and finally comes across a rambling rose bush but alas, the bush has no roses to offer her. However, there is a way to MAKE a red rose, but with grave consequences. This story can be found freely on many websites:http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-sto...http://www.literaturepage.com/read/th...http://www.oscarwildecollection.com/

    Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

    On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.

    Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

    When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious scholarship. Hans dutifully follows the regimen of tireless study and endless examinations, his success rewarded only with more crushing assignments. When Hans befriends a rebellious young poet, he begins to imagine other possibilities outside the narrowly circumscribed world of the academy. Finally sent home after a nervous breakdown, Hans is revived by nature and romance, and vows never to return to the gray conformity of the academic system.

    Dumas's subtle and moving portrait of a woman in love is based on his own love affair with one of the most desirable courtesans in Paris. This is a completely new translation commissioned for the World's Classics.

    The plot spans from 1912 to 1944. For more than half a century the book has been loved by children and adults alike. The novel has undergone more than 100 printings, including translations into other languages. Based on its story, plays have been staged and an opera has been written. The plot of the book also became the basis of two movies of the same title in 1955 and 1976. In 1995 in Pskov, the home town of the author, a monument was erected to the characters of the book and a "Two Captains" museum was opened.The real prototype for Captain Tatarinov was Lieutenant Georgii Brusilov, who in 1912 organized a privately funded expedition seeking a west-to-east Northern sea route. The steamship "St. Anna," specially built for the expedition, left Petersburg on 28 July 1912. Near the shores of Yamal peninsula it was seized by ice and carried in the ice drift to the north of the Kara Sea. The expedition survived two hard winters. Of the 14 people who left the stranded steamship in 1914, only two made it to one of the islands of Frants-Joseph Land and were spotted and taken aboard "St. Foka," the ship of the expedition of G. Y. Sedov. The ship log they had kept with them contained the most important of the scientific data, after the study of which Sedov's expedition found the previously unknown island in the Kara Sea, Vize Island. The ultimate fate of "St.Anna" and its remaining crew is still unknown. Veniamin Kaverin (1902-1989) wrote novels, short stories, fairy tales, memoirs, and biographies. In the early 1920s, Veniamin Kaverin was a member of experimental literary group "Serapionovi bratya." In 1946 his novelTwo Captains became the winner of the USSR State Literature Award.