Category: Brief contents

Frosty My stepmother has a daughter and stepdaughter. The old woman decides to drive the stepdaughter out of the yard and orders her husband to take the girl “in a clear field to the crackling frost.” He obeys. In the clear field Frost Red nose greets the girl. She responds gently. Frost becomes a pity…

B. Sh. Okudzhava Travel of amateurs The novel, which takes place in 1845-1855, begins with the return of Prince Sergei Myatlev and narrator Amiran Amilahvari after a duel (which ended in nothing) in the spacious St. Petersburg house of the prince, filled with copies of antique masterpieces. The living room was turned into a fencing…

François Mauriac Snake Club In the rich estate of Kalez, his sixty-eight-year-old master, a successful lawyer, is slowly dying from the angina toad. His family is looking forward to its end. He himself writes about this in a letter-diary, which he addresses to his wife and in which he sums up his life. As a…

“The Hari clan” is an ancient Indian epic poem in 3 books, considered an attachment to the “Mahabharata”. The first and third books of the poem set forth the most important Hindu myths about the creation, origin of the gods and demons, the legendary kings of the Sun and Moon dynasties, earth incarnations for the…

Coming to a narration about the adventures of his hero, the author discusses two types of depiction of reality. “Historians,” or “topographers,” are satisfied that they are engaged in “cheating from nature.” The author considers himself to be a “biographer” and his task is to describe “not people, but mores, not an individual, but a…

Almost one hundred and thirty years have passed since the Norman Duke William the Conqueror defeated the Anglo-Saxon armies and captured England at the Battle of Hastings (1066). The English people are going through hard times. King Richard the Lionheart did not return from the last crusade, taken prisoner by the treacherous Duke of Austria.…

Sparrows are just like people’s: adult sparrows and sparrows are boring boring and talk about everything as it is written in books, and young people live by their own mind. Once upon a time there was a yellow-throated sparrow, his name was Pudik, and he lived above the window of the bathhouse, behind the upper…

William Faulkner The village of the French Balka was called part of the fertile river valley twenty miles southeast of Jefferson, Joknapatofa County, Mississippi. Once it was a colossal plantation, the remains of which – the box of a huge house, the ruined stables and barracks for slaves, overgrown gardens – were now called the…

M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin Pompadours and Pompadours In a brief introduction, the author says that this book was written with the aim of shedding light on a very peculiar sphere of life activity, in which everything is so dark and vague that every novice pompadour needs explications and interpretations. Well, for example, a boss coming to…

I stared at the ship motionless. Brightly lit, it rested on the surface of the Tajo. not far from the embankment. Although I had been in Lisbon for a week, I still could not get used to the carefree lights of this city. In the countries where I came from, the cities lay black at…