Under Western Eyes

'It was I who removed de P- this morning.'. With these chilling words Victor Haldin shatters the solitary, industrious existence of Razumov, his fellow student at St Petersburg University.

Razumov aims to overcome the denial of his noble birth by a brilliant career in the tsarist bureaucracy created by Peter the Great.

But in pre-revolutionary Russia Peter's legacy is autocracy tempered by assassination; and Razumov is soon caught in a tragic web with Haldin's trustful sister Natalia in spy-haunted Geneva.

Their fateful story is told by an elderly Englishman who loves Natalia but plays his part of a 'dense Westerner' to the end.

This first completely new edition of Conrad's 1911 classic weeds out long-undisturbed errors; it also reveals Conrad's prodigious grasp 'of Russia's literature...of her administration and the cross currents of her thought'.

At a new, uncertain dawn in Russian history, Conrad's view of 'the psychology of Russia itself' is of timely interest to every 'dense Westerner' - and of timeless interest as one of our century's most powerful and profound novels.