Comedy PDF EPUB

Futility

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1922
Pages: 170

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About this book

Gerhardie drew on his own upbringing among the English community in Russia to tell a wry, aching story of love and drift. His Anglo-Russian narrator keeps returning to the sprawling Bursanov household, and to Nina, one of three sisters he cannot quite win, while revolution gathers offstage and money, promises, and hangers-on pile up around the family. The mood owes much to Chekhov: comedy and sadness sit side by side, and nothing resolves the way anyone hopes. Admired by Katherine Mansfield and later by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, it catches a vanishing world with light, unsentimental precision. This free PDF and EPUB edition revives a neglected comic classic of the early twentieth century.

About the author

William Gerhardie

William Gerhardie (1895-1977) was an English novelist born in St Petersburg to a British industrial family. Educated at Oxford, he won early acclaim for Futility and The Polyglots, and the admiration of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, though his later years faded into neglect.

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