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In St Petersburg, Razumov, a lonely, hard-working student with no family, wants only to win a university prize and a quiet career. Then a fellow student…
In St Petersburg, Razumov, a lonely, hard-working student with no family, wants only to win a university prize and a quiet career. Then a fellow student, Victor Haldin, who has just assassinated a hated government minister with a bomb, comes to his room and asks for help to escape. Fearing for his own future, Razumov betrays him to the police, and is then sent by the secret police to spy on Russian revolutionaries in exile in Geneva, among them Haldin's mother and his trusting sister Natalia, who believes Razumov was her brother's friend.
Context and significance
Joseph Conrad published the novel in 1911. Told by an elderly English teacher of languages in Geneva, the 'Western eyes' of the title, it is often read as Conrad's answer to Dostoevsky, whom he disliked, and it is a dark study of guilt, autocracy and revolution. Compare Crime and Punishment and Conrad's The Secret Agent.
About the author
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Korzeniowski to Polish parents in today's Ukraine. His father was exiled for patriotic activities, and Conrad was orphaned at eleven. At sixteen he went to sea from Marseille, and he spent twenty years as a sailor, rising to captain in the British merchant navy.
A voyage up the Congo in 1890 marked him for life and led to Heart of Darkness. He began writing in English, his third language, and became one of its great novelists with Lord Jim and Nostromo. His books ask what people do when no one is watching.