From the author of Books like - Heart of Darkness - Lord Jim - Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction - The Secret Agent - Nostromo - Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer - Heart of Darkness and Other Tales - The Shadow-Line - The Secret Sharer - Victory - Tales Of Hearsay - Under Western Eyes - The Arrow Of Gold - The Inheritors - Tales Of Unrest About the Book: Joseph Conrad’s historical novel, Under Western Eyes (1911), is considered Conrad’s thematic response to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). Critics consider the book one of Conrad’s finest pieces of literature and a companion to another one of his novels, The Secret Agent. In Part First, an English teacher in Geneva narrates the personal record of Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov, a university student in St. Petersburg in the early 1910s. As he never knew his parents, Razumov holds no family connections. Although revolutionary ideas are swirling in the air, he takes no part in them, aims for a middle-class life, and considers Russia his family. Meanwhile, the savage Minister of State Mr. de P is assassinated by a pair of terrorists, although the bomb also kills the minister’s footman, one of the terrorists, and several people nearby. Razumov enters his apartment to find a fellow student, Victor Haldin, claiming it was he who murdered the minister. Haldin’s escape plan was faulty and he asks Razumov for help, who reluctantly agrees. Haldin asks him to find Ziemiantich, who was supposed to lend his assistance in the escape. About the Author: Joseph Conrad, original name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]—died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England), English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story “Heart of Darkness” (1902). During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual ...(100 of 2481 words). Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.