The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad

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Title: Under Western Eyes

Author: Joseph Conrad

Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #2480]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER WESTERN EYES ***

Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger

UNDER WESTERN EYES

by JOSEPH CONRAD

"I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece
of bread." Miss HALDIN

PART FIRST

To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of
imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create
for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the
Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor--Kirylo Sidorovitch--Razumov.

If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been
smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for
many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length
becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight
an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes
a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a
mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Razumov or guessed at his
reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was.
Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly
beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the
readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of
documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on
a document; all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the Russian
language, which is sufficient for what is attempted here. The document,
of course, is something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not
exactly that in its actual form. For instance, most of it was not
written up from day to day, though all the entries are dated. Some of
these entries cover months of time and extend over dozens of pages. All
the e