Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad, is about living in a time of revolutionary urgency, individual fragility in a delicate system, and personal honor. Razumov, the hero of Conrad's book, is a university student in Russia in the early 1900's who keeps to himself and has no real family and no close friends. A fellow student and revolutionary, Victor Haldin, assasinates a local oppressive Tsarist autocrat. He then takes a chance and takes momentary asylum with Razumov, asking him to help him get out of the city. Razumov is an evolutionary progressive, not a revolutionary. Not willing to risk association with a radical like Haldin and destroy his entire life, Razumov turns him in to the police, and Haldin is subsequently hung. The rest of the novel deals with Razumov's struggle with himself for betrayal and living with a lie. To further complicate matters, Razumov falls in love with Haldin's sister in exile. The real meat of the novel is in the characters and the ideas underlying the conversations between them. The idea of how you justify revolution, the chaos of revolution versus the order of gradual reform, and the unwillingness and helplessness of the individual caught in it all are really themes of this book. There's also a continual theme of the difference between East and West. Razumov reminds a bit of Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov- an isolated university student waxing the time away in a single apartment, brooding over Big Ideas and being slowly crushed by a powerful conscience. The stuff of modernity. If you've enjoyed books by Dostoyevsky, you'll likely appreciate Conrad's book.
About the Author: Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish British novelist, who became a British subject in 1886. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and then always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical or seaboard setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honor. Conrad was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors. Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad's Victory, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, An Outcast of the Islands, The Rover, The Shadow Line, The Duel, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the French and later the British Merchant Navy to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a worldwide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul.