Read Eugene Onegin

A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".

A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.

Two married people meet in Yalta expecting a holiday affair and find they cannot end it; the story modern short fiction is measured against.

Pilgrims to Becket's shrine tell stories to pass the road; the Miller's is the rude one.

Whitman's "Song of Myself" and the free verse he kept expanding for forty years.

Dostoevsky's tense moral descent of a guilty student (1866).

The timeless falling-blocks puzzle (1984).

Tolstoy's epic of Russia in the Napoleonic age (1869).