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.