Under Western Eyes

A Petersburg student betrays a revolutionary to the police, is sent by them to Geneva to spy on the exiles, and finds the dead man's sister waiting there. Conrad's father was sent into Russian exile and died soon after his release and he loathed the whole subject; he had a breakdown finishing this book, and it is the most controlled thing he wrote — a study of the informer as the century's representative man. Sixty plates of winter landscapes and scenes of arrest by Repin and Shishkin run from 1800 to 1915, matching the novel's cold climate of surveillance and exile.