household

Dorothy has always been a believer. Her father, a priest, helped her believe in God, and now the girl sincerely tries to be correct. She punishes herself for every misconduct, leads a household and an active social life, waiting with horror for censure. But one day she lost her memory. Now Dorothy is stuck with the vagabonds, where no faith exists.

Inspired by Dostoevsky’s own gambling addiction and written under pressure in order to pay off his creditors and retain his rights to his literary legacy, „The Gambler” is set in the casino of the fictional German spa town of Roulettenburg and follows the misfortunes of the young tutor Alexei Ivanovich working in the household of an imperious Russian general. He begins gambling to win enough money...

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honoré de Balzac’s „Eugénie Grandet” (1833) is one of the earliest and most famous novels in his „Comedie humaine” cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently...