This major critical work by the great French novelist reveals Stendhal's decisive role in the literary renaissance called Romanticism. Written sixteen years before 'The Charterhouse of Parma', it marked the beginning of his illustrious career and established him at the forefront of the French Romantic movement. The first part of 'Racine and Shakespeare' appeared as a pamphlet in 1823, when Waterloo was still bitterly alive in the French mind. In it, Stendhal vigorously championed the spontaneous vitality of Shakespeare while condemning the rigid imitators of Corneille and Racine. The second half of 'Racine and Shakespeare' appeared two years later in answer to a speech against Romanticism by the secretary of the Academie Francaise. It is a brilliant tour de force, an exchange of letters between an old classicist and a young Romanticiist, in which Stendhal defined Romanticism not only for his age but for all time.

The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase take on a bizarre life of their own. Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise. The two tales by Mikhail Saltykov are satirical attacks on civil servants and Russia's autocracy. The final piece, Tolstoy's Ivan the Fool, is a playful and allegorical critique of contemporary Russian society. Together, they represent some of Russia's finest comic writing before the twentieth century.