Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad's novel of political treachery and oppression, of betrayal, guilt, and intrigue, begins with a bomb that kills its intended target, a hated Russian minister of police, along with a number of innocent bystanders. A young student named Razumov hides the perpetrator, then betrays him and becomes a spy among his exiled comrades. He faces a moral dilemma from which there is no escape.

Conrad professed that he intended to render "the psychology of Russia", a country being driven by a Czarist despotism into anarchy by revolutionaries, "unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names". This masterwork, published six years before the Russian Revolution, is a chillingly accurate prophecy of what was to come.