Under Western Eyes

Razumov, an ambitious student in St Petersburg, is unexpectedly approached by Victor Haldin after Haldin assassinates a senior official of the Tsarist state. Fearing that association with the revolutionary will destroy his future, Razumov informs the authorities and helps deliver Haldin to arrest and execution. The secret binds him to the political world he hoped to avoid, and the police send him to Geneva as an agent among Russian revolutionary exiles.

In Switzerland, Razumov meets Haldin’s mother and sister Natalia, who believe he was the dead man’s trusted friend. Their confidence intensifies his conflict between self-preservation, guilt and the demands of the regime that controls him. Told through an English observer, the novel examines revolutionary idealism, autocratic surveillance and exile while showing how both state and opposition reduce private lives to instruments of political struggle.