AA Milne Two Quiet life in a country estate, “old good England”. Reginald Wellard is happy – he is married to a beautiful woman, so beautiful that outsiders, after seeing her, cry out with delight. He is forty years old, she is twenty-five; he adores her, and she seems to him too (he is not … Read more
“Valley of Terror” – Detective story of Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1915. First Summary. In the first part of Sherlock. The basis is the stories “Dancing Men”, “The Valley of Horror” (an episode with detailed information about the content of the new series is missing, however. Sherlock Holmes receives an encrypted letter from a … Read more
Isaac Asimov Themselves Gods Earth. The second half of the XXI century. Quite an ordinary mediocre radiochemist Frederic Hallam accidentally discovers that in a dusty flask with a label “Wolfram” suddenly turned out to be some other substance. Spectrometric analysis shows that this is an isotope of plutonium, which theoretically can not exist, in addition … Read more
“Matrenin yard” Solzhenitsyn – a story about the tragic fate of an open, not similar to his fellow villagers Matryona. Published for the first time in the journal “New World” in 1963. The story is from the first person. The protagonist becomes Matryona’s lodger and talks about her amazing fate. The first title of the … Read more
The text of the first adventure novel, known in the world literature, was only fragmented: fragments of the 15th, 16th and, presumably, the 14th chapter. There is no beginning, there is no end, and everything, apparently, was 20 chapters… The protagonist is the unbalanced youth Enkolpiy, who is well-versed in the rhetoric, obviously smart, but, … Read more
LN Andreev Petka at the dacha Ten-year-old boy Petka was sent to the teachings of barber Osip Abramovich. In a cheap hairdresser he brings water, the master and apprentices constantly shout at him and swear at him. His friend Nikolka is 13 years old, Nikolka knows a lot of bad words and often tells Petka … Read more
Yaroslav Ivashkevich (Polish: Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, also known under the pseudonym Eleuter, February 20, 1894 – March 2, 1980) is a Polish writer, poet, playwright, translator, laureate of the International Lenin Prize “For Strengthening Peace Among Nations” (1970). Yaroslav Ivashkevich was born in the village of Kalnik near Kiev, in the Russian Empire. He studied at … Read more
IE Babel Odessa stories The King Barely ended the wedding and began to prepare for a wedding dinner, as a Moldovan raider Bene Creek nicknamed King comes an unfamiliar young man and reports that a new bailiff has arrived and Benya is preparing a round-up. The king replies that he knows about the bailiff, and … Read more
The action takes place in Mexico in the late XVIII – early XIX century. The novel opens with a description of the holiday in honor of the day of St. John in the small Mexican town of San Ildefonso. Here all the layers of society are having fun. Among the aristocrats stands Catalina de Cruces, … Read more
Germain Malorty, nicknamed Mushette, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Campanian brewer, once entering the dining room with a full bucket of fresh milk, felt unwell; parents immediately guessed that she was pregnant. The obstinate girl does not want to say who the father of the future child is, but her father realized that they can … Read more
The whole book is built on the boundary of the analytical, grotesque essay and satirical narrative. So what kind of creature is this – a Tashkenter – and what does she crave? She longs for only one thing: “To eat!”. Whatever it was, at the cost of anything. And Tashkent is turning into a country … Read more
The basis of the plot of the drama was a historical event – the uprising of the Silesian weavers of 1844. House of Drayciger, the owner of the paper factory in Peterswaldau. In a special room, the weavers hand over the finished fabric, the receiver Pfeifer controls, and the cashier Neiman counts the money. Poorly … Read more
The protagonist of the story is the 12-year-old boy Vanya Solntsev. He lived in one of the Russian villages. Vanya’s father was killed in the war, and his mother was killed by the Germans. Soon his sister and grandmother died of starvation, and Vanya was left alone. When he asked for charity in the village, … Read more
In the guerrilla camp there was no special room for the prisoners, so the caught Styopka Tolkach was sitting in a well prepared pit. The arrested person recalled everything that had happened in the last days. From the very beginning of the service, Stepan was not completely trusted in the camp, and in this connection … Read more
The scene of the tragedy occurs in XI. in Scotland and England. I talk three witches about when they will meet again, and agree that after the victory of one of the parties. In a military camp near Forres, the Scottish king Duncan receives the joyful news that Macbeth, the cousin of the king, defeated … Read more
Charles Dickens Big Hope In the neighborhood of Rochester, an ancient town southeast of London, lived a seven-year-old boy, nicknamed Pip. He was left without parents, and his “own hands” was brought up by an older sister who “had a rare ability to turn purity into something more uncomfortable and unpleasant than any dirt.” With … Read more
V. A. Zhukovsky Svetlana Once a Epiphany Evening The girls guessed: The slipper, Forgetting the foot, was thrown out of the gate. They tried to find out their destiny, their destiny. Among the girls only Svetlana is silent and sad, she does not sing, does not guess. Her dear is far away, and already a … Read more
Between the husband and wife a quarrel breaks out because of the fact that she suspects him of treason. The angry husband leaves, and the wife complains to the neigbour. She promises her friend to find out whether her fears are justified. They have a ripened plan: when the husband returns home, the wife will … Read more
The action takes place in Naples in the rich house of the fifty-two-year-old Don Domenico Soriano, a successful entrepreneur. In the room are himself Don Domenico, Donna Filumena Marturano, the woman with whom he lived for the last twenty years, Donna Rosalia Solimene, a seventy-five-year old woman who shared the most grievous moments in the … Read more
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy Hell On the half-way of life I – Dante – got lost in a dense forest. Scary, wild animals all around – allegories of vices; to go nowhere. And here is a ghost that turned out to be the shadow of my beloved ancient Roman poet Virgil. I ask him … Read more
For many hours, Sherlock Holme sat hunched over a glass vial in which something unusually smelly was being cooked. His head was lowered to his chest, and he seemed to me like a strange tovtyuyu bird with dull gray feathers and a black tuft. “So, Watson,” he said suddenly, “are not you going to invest … Read more
William Lee was born and raised in a fashionable quiet suburb of one of the big cities of the Midwest. In childhood and adolescence, he did not stand out among peers, except that he read them much more. At the end of Harvard, William staggered for a year on pre-war Europe, the benefit of a … Read more
L. N. Tolstoy Hadji Murad On a cold November evening in 1851, Hadji Murad, the famous naib of Imam Shamil, drives into the inhospitable Chechen aul Mahket. A Chechen Sado receives a guest in his sakle, despite Shamil’s recent order to detain or kill the rebellious naiba. On the same night, three soldiers with non-commissioned … Read more
In the first lines of the novel Obruchev describes the appearance at the meeting of the Imperial Geographical Society of an unnamed “naval officer who performed a bold swim in the whaleboat through the Arctic Sea from the Novosibirsk Islands to the Bennett Island, to which Baron Tallle landed, who did not return from there,” … Read more
MA Sholokhov Birthmark On the table are cartridges, lamb bone, a field map, a brief, a bridle, a crust of bread. At the table sits Nikolka Koshevoy, squadron commander, he fills out the questionnaire. “A rusty sheet says sparingly: Nikolai Koshevoi, squadron commander, a surveyor, a member of the RCYU, age 18 years.” He looked … Read more
The action of the comedy takes place in a fantastic country for the English of Shakespeare’s time – Illyria. The Duke of Illyria Orsino is in love with the young Countess Olivia, but she is in mourning after the death of her brother and even does not accept the emissaries of the duke. The indifference … Read more
The story consists of 24 chapters, each of which, in fact, is a small independent finished story. From the first chapter, the reader will learn about the preparations for an interstellar journey to collect rare alien animals, Professor Seleznev and his daughter Alisa, whom he promised to take with him. Participation in the expedition of … Read more
This poem by Heinrich Heine tells of a bear named Atta Troll. The action begins in 1841 in the small resort town of Cotere in the Pyrenees, where the lyrical hero rested with his wife Matilda, whom he affectionately calls Juliet. Their balcony went out just to the city square, and they could watch every … Read more
The action takes place in the modern author of the play of Germany. The plot unfolds for two years. Drama is preceded by the epigraph of Hippocrates, which in the Russian translation reads: “What medicines do not heal, heals iron, which does not heal iron, heals fire.” In the ancestral castle of the barons von … Read more
A. Blok’s poem “Nightingale Garden” is a typically romantic work, therefore its main images are conditional, do not have the features of a specific time and space. Using his favorite method of antithesis, the poet contrasts in the poem two themes, two opposing notions about the meaning of life: the paradise existence in the nightingale … Read more
Northwest of France. Rouen. The May morning of 1819, Jeanne, a blond girl with blue agate eyes, the daughter of Baron Le Perthieux de Vaux, herself puts the suitcases and looks out the window again: the rain does not cease… And so you want to go! Jeanne has just returned to her parents’ house from … Read more
On the farm Yakimovschina, which is located three meters from the town of Vyselki, lived Stepanida and Petrok Bogatki. They had two children: the son of Fyodor (served in tank troops), and Fenya’s daughter (studied in a medical institution in Minsk). After the war began, and the front goes to the east, German soldiers appear … Read more
There was a small flower in the world. No one knew that he was on earth. He grew up alone in a vacant lot; cows and goats did not go there, and the children from the pioneer camp there never played. In the wasteland, the grass did not grow, but only the old gray stones … Read more
On one of the hottest days of 1853, two young people were lying on the shores of the Moscow River in the shade of a blooming linden tree. The twenty-three-year-old Andrei Petrovich Bersenev has just graduated as the third candidate of the Moscow University, and an academic career awaited him. Pavel Yakovlevich Shubin was a … Read more
Morning in the house of Jourdain. The teacher of music and the dance teacher discuss how they were lucky with Jourdain: “We found just the kind of person we need.” Mr. Jourdain, with his insanity on the nobility and on secular ways, is just a treasure for us, his knowledge is not great, he judges … Read more
The action takes place in Moscow. Several months have passed since Sergei Afanasievich Troitsky died. His wife, Olga, a biologist, still can not recover from the loss of her husband, who died at the age of forty-two from a heart attack. She still lives in the same apartment with his mother Alexandra Prokofievna, a woman … Read more
The action of Ch. P. Snow’s novel “Corridors of Power” takes place in Great Britain in 1955-1958. The protagonist of the novel is a young Conservative politician representing the left wing of his party, Roger Kuif. The narrative is conducted on behalf of his colleague, and later a friend of Lewis Eliot In the spring … Read more
By the end of the XVII century. After the death of Emperor Fyodor Alekseevich, a struggle for power begins in Russia. Rebellion streltsy, instigated by the princess Sophia and her lover, ambitious prince Vasily Golitsyn. There were two tsars in Moscow-the youngest Ivan Alekseevich and Pyotr Alekseyevich, and above them the ruler of Sophia. “Everything … Read more
Makar is the main character, a peasant. The author himself referred his work to “holy stories”. Written in the Yakut exile (the winter of 1883), the story was inspired by the real impressions of the young writer (he lived with peasant Zakhar Tsykunov, who became the prototype of Makar). But, calling in the original sketches … Read more
Umberto Eco Pendulum Foucault The plot of this novel by a well-known Italian writer, philologist and historian of literature falls on the beginning of the seventies of the 20th century, a time when youth riots were still raging in Italy. However, the “political choice” of the narrator, a student at the Milan University of Casobone, … Read more
In the preface to his book, the author confesses that he wrote it, following “the example of the excellent Florentine poet, Messer Giovanni Boccaccio.” “I, the Florentine Franco Sacchetti, an ignorant and rude man, asked himself to write a book for you, collecting in it stories about all those unusual cases that, in the old … Read more
“The times of Miloradovichs, Davydovs, Pushkins” … In the provincial city of K. there are congresses of landowners and gentry elections. In the best hotel of the city comes a young hussar officer, Count Turbin. There are no free rooms; “retired cavalryman” Zavalshevsky proposes the graph to stay in his room, lends Turbine money. Actually, … Read more
“In accordance with the law, Cincinnatus C. declared a death sentence in a whisper.” Unforgivable Cincinnatus wine – in its “impenetrability”, “opacity” for the rest, to the horror of similar, “transparent friend for friend of souls.” This feature is inherent in Cincinnatus since childhood, but for some time he manages to hide his difference from … Read more
Of course, even the most “richest” collection of books that only exists in the world, the most valuable for most children born in the Soviet and Russian epochs, is the “immortal” work about Baby and Carlson, once created by a truly talented writer from Sweden Astrid Lindgren. In this case, all agree that the question: … Read more
ME Saltykov-Shchedrin Wild landowner In a certain kingdom, in a certain state, there lived a landowner, “and everything he had was enough: peasants, and bread, and livestock, and lands, and gardens.” He was stupid, read the newspaper “News” and the body was soft, white and friable. “ He does not like one thing, and, behold, … Read more
In the Moscow house of Oblonsky, where “everything was mixed up” at the end of the winter of 1873, the host’s sister, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, was waiting. The reason for the family frustration was that Prince Stepan Arkadievich Oblonsky convicted his wife of treason with a governess. Thirty-four-year-old Steve Oblonsky sincerely feels sorry for Dolly’s … Read more
ABRAMOV, FEDOR ALEXANDROVICH (1920-1983), Russian writer. He was born on February 29, 1920 in with. Verkola Arkhangelsk region in the peasant family. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, a student at the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University went to the front. After the war he completed higher education, became a candidate of science, head … Read more
On a sunny summer day, the talented painter Basil Hallward takes in his workshop an old friend of Lord Henry Wotton – the epicurean esthete, the “Prince of Paradox”, by definition of one of the characters. In the latter one easily recognizes the features of Oscar Wilde, familiar to contemporaries, to whom the author of … Read more
Salbiarg, daughter of Kari, becomes the wife of Ulva, nicknamed Kveldulv. They have two sons – Thorolf and Grim. Harald, nicknamed Shaggy defeated the neighboring konungs and became the sole king of Norway. At his insistence, Kveldulv sends his son Thorolf to him; Kveldulv himself believes that Harald will do a lot of evil to … Read more
JOAKKINO ROSSINI 1792-1868 Rossini – an outstanding Italian composer of the last century, whose work was marked by the flowering of national opera. He was able to breathe new life into the traditional for Italy kinds of opera – comic (buffa) and “serious” (seria). Especially brightly Rossini’s talent unfolded in the field of opera buffa. … Read more