Description du livre
Geneva, a haven for exiles and plotters, becomes the claustrophobic stage for a profound drama of political and personal guilt. Razumov, a solitary and earnest student in St. Petersburg, is no revolutionary. His only ambition is academic success and a quiet, sanctioned life. But when a fellow student, the assassin Victor Haldin, bursts into his rooms seeking refuge, Razumov’s fate is sealed in an instant of panic and betrayal.
Desperate to protect his own fragile future, Razumov commits an act that makes him a secret tool of the Tsarist autocracy and sends him on a treacherous mission to spy on the revolutionary circle in Geneva—a circle that includes Haldin’s grieving sister, Natalia. Tormented by isolation and consumed by a secret he can share with no one, Razumov is caught in an impossible vice: hunted by the state he serves and revered by the exiles he is doomed to destroy.
Narrated by an elderly English teacher who observes the tragedy with detached, "Western eyes," Conrad’s novel is a relentless psychological exploration of a man crushed by the machinery of history. A profound response to the Russian literary tradition, Under Western Eyes strips away the romance of revolution to expose its human cost—the corruption of ideals, the destruction of trust, and the unending torment of a divided soul. It is Conrad’s most political and piercingly modern study of the darkness within the individual heart and the oppressive state.