I read Heart of Darkeness by Joseph Conrad, The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, and An Incident at Kretochka Station and Matryona's House both by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The first three were in a book called 11 Modern Short Novels , while the last two composed a book called We Never Make Mistakes! I liked the first book because there was biographical information on the authors at the end of each chapter, as well as talking points about the stories and connections between those novels in the volume and other stories written by the included authors. It was clearly intended to be a text book for an English Literature class. I may go back some time and read the other stories -- at least the ones I have not read previously (Camus' Stranger and Kafka's Metamorphosis ). I'ld never even heard of the other others prior to browsing this text.
Similarities between how death is handled in Matryona's house and Ivan Ilyich. Most of the people surrounding the deceased are only concerned for exactly how they can gain from the person's death. The only person who seems to care about Ivan is his son, for Matryona, her step-daughter (and the narrator).
I also note an obvious similarity between Matryona and Prince Myshkin ( The Idiot ). Both were selfless individuals, both were considered stupid, both were taken advantage of by exactly those people who called them stupid. In both cases, the author draws very clear distinctions between the good guys (Matryona and Myshkin) and the bad guys (everyone else).
Beast in the Jungle was written by the brother of William James. The story telegraphs the moral too early in the story. The reader figures out what the beast is very early on and the rest of the story is a bit tedious.
Heart of Darkness was recommended to me by my friend Dean some time ago. He said it was the story after which the movie "Apocolypse Now" was patterned. Very interesting. I'm still digesting this story. Kind of interesting to think that it was actually written before Hitler's rise to power.
In Incident , the narrator is a station master at a railway junction and befriends a fellow whom he later suspects of being a (probably german) spy. He turns the guy over to the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) and then wonders the rest of his life whether he did the rigth thing - but he can't directly inquire about what happened to the fellow, because he's afraid he'll end up in a prison camp. Despite the fact that he wanted nothing more than to serve the people in the fight against fascism, he obviously later understands very clearly that the dictatorship of the people is untrustworthy.
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