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Reading in English
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Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is the world's best-known mystery writer. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in over 45 foreign languages. She is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.
Agatha Miller was born in Torquay, England on September 15, 1890. In 1914 she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind, before their divorce in 1928.
In a writing career that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote 79 novels and short story collections. She also wrote over a dozen plays including The Mousetrap, which opened in London on November 25, 1952, and is now the longest continuously running play in theatrical history.
Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), was also the first to feature her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Surely one of the most famous fictional creations of all time, Poirot's "little grey cells" triumphed over devious criminals in 33 novels and many dozens of short stories. Christie's last published novel, Sleeping Murder (1976), featured her other world-famous sleuth, the shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary Mead. Miss Marple appeared in twelve novels, beginning with The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.
Both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple have been widely dramatized in feature films and made-for-TV movies. Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), And Then There Were None (1945), and Death on the Nile (1978) are a few of the successful films based on her works.
Agatha Christie also wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. She wrote nonfiction as well - four books including an autobiography and an entertaining account of the many archeological expeditions she shared with her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan. In 1971, she achieved her country's highest honor when she received the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire. Agatha Christie died on January 12, 1976.
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Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters andThe Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyceand other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. -
Charles Dickens
Four of the best English writers of the 19th century: Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte and Elisabeth Gaskell were called by Karl Marx the "Glorious School of English Novelists". Marx said that these writers had done more to show social and political truths to the world than all the politicians, journalists and moralists put together. They gave a picture of the English upper classes with all their selfishness and pride, their ignorance and greed.
One of the greatest writers of this school of novelists was Charles Dickens. He was born in 1812 in the family of a small government official in the city of Portsmouth. There Charles first went to school. Never a strong child, he could not join his friends in games or any sports. He spent most of his free time reading various books. In 1821 the family moved to London where his father was soon ruined. His father was thrown into a debtor's prison called Marshalsea and the whole family went to live there. For many years the dark buildings of the Marshalsea prison were the family's home. Charles though only ten years of age had to leave school and began a long and hard struggle with poverty. In order to help the family in some way he went to work at a blacking factory. He worked from early morning till late at night. He suffered so much pain as a child laborer in the factory, that years later at the height of his adult fame, the childhood pain continued to haunt him, and to speak of that time, caused him great distress.
Many years passed before Charles returned to school. When he graduated from school he became a reporter at one of London's newspapers. He did his work so well that he was considered to be the best parliamentary reporter in London. The work of a reporter led him to journalism, and journalism led to novel-writing. In 1836 when only twenty-four years of age, Charles Dickens wrote his first book "Sketches by Boz". This book was followed by "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" and in two years by "Oliver Twist". These novels brought him fame both in England and in other countries. From that time on Charles Dickens devoted himself to literature. His most famous novels are "Hard Times", "David Copperfield", "Domby and Son" and others. Charles Dickens died in 1870, at the age of fifty-eight. In his books he protested against social injustice in bourgeois society, the work-houses, the debtor's prisons and the ruthless exploitation of children. It is this exposure of social injustice in bourgeois society that makes his books so important though he did not call for active struggle against the exploiting classes.
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Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri is beyond doubt the greatest of Italian poets, and, many readers think, one of the greatest poets that Western civilization has produced. W. B. Yeats called him "the chief imagination of Christendom." T. S. Eliot said: "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third."
He was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. Italy in those days was not a united country, but a collection of mostly small city-states. Feuds and power struggles between noble families were a constant source of wars between states and of turmoil and civil war within them. Dante, heir of a poor but noble family, was one of the seven elected officials in charge of the government of Florence, when an accidental collision in the street during the May Festival in 1300 led to a brawl that escalated into a civil war that ultimately got Dante's party overthrown and its leaders (including Dante) exiled from Florence. He spent the rest of his life in exile, pining for his native city.
In 1293 he published a book called the Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), in which he relates how he fell in love with a young girl (Beatrice), and found his chief happiness in thinking of her, and looking at her from afar. In 1304 or shortly thereafter he published De Vulgari Eloquentia, an argument for writing poems and other works in the language that people speak (in his case, Italian) rather than in Latin. At the same time he wrote Il Convivio ("The Banquet"), in which he discusses grammar, and styles of poetry, and complains that his own poems, and in particular some of the things he said in the Vito Nuova, have been much misunderstood. In 1313 he published De Monarchia ("On Monarchy" or "A Treatise on Government"), in which he argued that the authority of a secular prince is not derived from the authority of the church, and is not given him by the pope, but comes directly from God (although in his exercise of it he ought, like every other Christian, to be guided by the moral instruction of the spiritual authority).
When he began writing his masterpiece, the Commedia, we do not know. (A "comedy," as traditionally defined, is a story that "begins in sorrow and ends in joy". Dante called his work simply "The Comedy." Later Italian writers speaking of the work called it "The Divine Comedy," by which name it is usually known today.) It appears that he had finished the first of its three parts by 1314, and the last only shortly before his death on 14 September 1321. (Because that is the Feast of the Holy Cross, he is remembered on the following day.)
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English writers
I like to read books. Literature helps us to live in this world and we learn a lot from books. Lately I have been interested in English literature very much. English books teach us to understand the English language the way native English speakers use language in expressing life. Such books as "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare help us to understand things which appear to be very simple in this life. When I read this book I looked at these things from a new fresh perspective.
And Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie. At times I secretly read at night under the covers, without my parents knowing. And I can name many others. Today I want tell you about Agatha Christie. Agatha Christie is known all over the world as the Queen of Crime. She wrote 78 crime novels, 19 plays and 6 romantic novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. Her books have been translated into 103 foreign languages. She is the third best-selling author in the world (after Shakespeare and the Bible). Many of her novels and short stories have been filmed. The Mousetrap, her most famous play, is now the longest-running play in history. Agatha Christie was born in Torquay, Devonshire. She was educated at home and took singing lessons in Paris. She began writing at the end of the First World War. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920. That was the first appearance of Hercule Poirot, who became one of the most popular private detectives since Sherlock Holmes. This little Belgian with an egg-shaped head and a passion for order amazes everyone by his powerful intellect and his brilliant solutions to the most complicated crimes. Agatha Christie became generally recognised in 1926, after the publishing of her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's still considered her masterpiece. When Agatha Christie got tired of Hercule Poirot she invented Miss Marple, a deceptively mild old lady with her own method of investigation. Her last Poirot book, Curtain, appeared shortly before her death, and her last Miss Marple story, Sleeping Murder and her autobiography were published after her death. Agatha Christie's success with million of readers lies in her ability to combine clever plots with excellent character drawing, and a keen since of humor with great powers of observation. Her plots always mislead the reader and keep him in suspense. He cannot guess who the criminal is. Fortunately evil is conquered in her novels. Agatha Christie's language is simple and good and it's pleasant to read her books in the original.
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Fedor Dostoevsky
The Russian writer Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the world's great novelists. In Russia he was surpassed only by Leo Tolstoy.
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on Nov. 11, 1821, in a Moscow hospital where his father was a physician. At 13 Fedor was sent to a Moscow boarding school, then to a military engineering school in St. Petersburg. Shortly after graduating he resigned his commission in order to devote his time to writing.
Dostoevsky had already published two novels and several sketches and short stories by the time he was arrested along with a group of about 20 others with whom he had been studying French socialist theories. After the 1848 revolutions in Western Europe, Russia's Czar Nicholas I decided to round up the country's revolutionaries, and in April 1849 Dostoevsky's group was imprisoned. He and several others were sentenced to be shot, but at the last minute their sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in a prison in Omsk, Siberia. There, he said, they were "packed in like herrings in a barrel" with murderers and other criminals. He read and reread the New Testament, the only book he had, and built a mystical creed, identifying Christ with the common people of Russia. He had great sympathy for the criminals.
As a child Dostoevsky suffered from mild epilepsy, and it grew worse in prison. After four years in prison, he was sent as a private to a military station in Siberia. There in 1857 he met and married a widow named Marie Isaeva.
By 1860 he was back in St. Petersburg. The next year he began to publish a literary journal that was soon suppressed, though he had by now lost interest in socialism. In 1862 he visited Western Europe and hated the industrialism he saw there. Dostoevsky was separated from his wife but visited her in Moscow before her death in 1864. In 1867 he married his young stenographer, Anna Snitkina. He died on Feb. 9, 1881, in St. Petersburg.
