Secret agent. Simple story; In the opinion of the West. Conrad J.

The real edition allows you to take a fresh look at the classic of English literature Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), which is known to the Russian reader a little one-sided-as a marinist and the author of adventure novels, the action of which unfolds in exotic countries. The personality of Conrad is unique in his own way: the Pole by origin, he, not knowing English in childhood, masterfully mastered him and became not only the captain of the British trade fleet, but then the writer, whose adventurous-psychological novels prepared the phenomenon of European modernism. Even such an esthete as G. James recognized his skill.

It is no less paradoxical that the author who declared hostility to everything Russian (to Russian literature, the Russian language, the Russian God -playing, the Russian revolutionary idea) creates two novels at the very peak of his work - “Secret Agent: simple history” (simple history ” 1907) and “in the West's opinion” (1910), united precisely by the “Russian theme”, in the interpretation of which Konrad follows F.M. Dostoevsky. In both novels, we find a tense intrigue, and colorful characters, and a deep psychological analysis of the adherents of terror, and a love theme, and criticism of modern Western civilization from the standpoint of a kind of messianism.

In the “Secret Agent” - the novel that Thomas Mann highly appreciated, - the man of the London “underground” recruited by the embassy of one eastern power (implies by the Russian Empire), forced by the pressure of his “curator” from the embassy to organize an explosion of the royal observatory in Greenwich - For the sake of international struggle against terror, depict an attempt on the foundations of Western civilization and science. Conrad describes in detail how the police follow the trail of the criminal and what collisions arise among the police officials themselves in connection with the disclosure of this secret; Heals with juicy colors portraits of anarchists, a family tragedy of the capital character, which turns out to be a characteristic Konrada double: at the same time both antihero and the hero “vice versa”. This sophisticated-psychological novel is often considered the most striking satirical work of Konrad, it is permeated with irony and black humor.

In the novel “In the West”, the action begins in St. Petersburg (an explosion by terrorists of the gendarme general de p. Geneva, among fanatically configured emigrant revolutionaries (prototypes of actors-M.A. Bakunin, Prince P.A. Kropotkin, see Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, S.L. Perovskaya, EF Azef and other Russian anarchists, Narodniks, revolutionaries), where a student recruited from Russia is sent from Russia.

Despite the bright external outline of events, the true theme of the Konradovsky novels is different: this is the tragedy of loners, who is overcome by mental suffering or flour of conscience, a fatal game of a person with fate, the fatal loss of innocence of the spirit, the curse of gold, the crisis of positivism, the shattering of being, the “sunset Europe ”, the deep confrontation of the West and the East, men and women, chaos and order. Behind the superficial layers of satire, politics, naturalism, psychological sketches, something deep -lyrical and even archetypal, a measurement that can cause images or even whole scenes from the New Testament, as well as Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, appears.