De polyglotten gaat over een excentrieke Belgisch/Engelse familie (en aanhang uit verschillende landen) die in het Verre Oosten woont tijdens de onzekere jaren na de Eerste Wereldoorlog en de Russische Revolutie. Het verhaal wordt verteld door hun droogkomische Engelse neef, legerkapitein Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, die tijdens een langdurige (internationale) militaire missie bij hen komt logeren. Het boek zit vol bizarre personages - depressievelingen, obsessievelingen, hypochonde...

Andrei Andreiech, un giovane uomo russo-inglese, si ritrova in compagnia delle tre incantevoli figlie della famiglia Bursanov. Il loro padre, Nikolai Vasilievič, è un uomo di potenziali mezzi, ma a parte una grande casa gran parte della sua ricchezza è immobilizzata in una serie di miniere d'oro siberiane improduttive. Tuttavia, la possibilità di futuri guadagni è sufficiente a tenerlo a galla, insieme alle figlie, alla sua amante, all'ex moglie e a tutta una schiera di parenti allargati e...

Andrei Andreiech, un joven hombre ruso-inglés, se encuentra en compañía de las tres encantadoras hijas de la familia Bursánov. Su padre, Nikolái Vasílievich, es un hombre de medios potenciales, pero aparte de una gran casa, gran parte de su riqueza está inmovilizada en una serie de minas de oro siberianas improductivas. Sin embargo, la posibilidad de futuras ganancias es suficiente para mantenerlo a flote, junto con sus hijas, su amante, su exesposa y toda una cohorte de parientes lejanos ...

Andrei Andreiech, a young Russian-English man, finds himself in the company of the three lovely daughters of the Bursanov family. Their father, Nikolai Vasilievich, is a man of potential means, but besides a large house most of his wealth is tied up in a series of non-productive Siberian goldmines. Still, the possibility of future income is enough to keep him afloat, along with his daughters, his lover, his ex-wife, and a whole series of extended family members and hangers-on. Both Nikolai...

William Gerhardie's first comic novel tells the story of a young Englishman who returns to St Petersburg where he was raised and falls in love with the daughter of a highly eccentric and dysfunctional family – a relationship which is played out with the armies of the Russian Revolution marching outside the parlour window.Part-British romantic comedy, part-Russian social realism, with Gerhardie's trademark large cast of wonderfully realised and highly memorable characters, this funn...

Set in the Far East just after the First World War, Gerhardie's comic masterpiece in the tale of an eccentric Belgian family, recounted by their young English relative who comes to stay with them.Filled with bizarre characters – depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs and sex maniacs – Gerhardie paints a wonderfully strange world where the comic and tragic are entwined.

Esta es la historia de Frank Dickin, un joven aspirante a escritor, y su relación con una excéntrica familia rusa, en particular con su hermosa hija Eva. Dickin, al que todos consideran pariente de Dickens, es también el protegido de lord Ottercove, un magnate de la prensa enamorado de la futura novela de Frank, en la que este narra sus aventuras y desventuras amorosas con las dos hijas de los emigrantes rusos. Con la aparición de un científico loco que se propone acabar con el sufrimiento...

Brillante, inclasificable y atemporal, Gerhardie fue aclamado en su época por autores como Graham Greene, H. G. Wells o Evelyn Waugh, quien lo consideraba un auténtico genio. Los políglotas, considerada una de las obras maestras subterráneas de la literatura inglesa y, para William Boyd, la novela más influyente del siglo XX en ese idioma, narra la historia de una excéntrica familia belga afincada en el Lejano Oriente durante los turbulentos años que siguieron a l...

Hailed by his famous contemporaries including Edith Wharton, H.G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, who called him a "genius," William Gerhardie is one of the twentieth century's forgotten masters, and his lovely comedy Futility one of the century's neglected masterpieces.It tells the story of someone very similar to Gerhardie himself: a young Englishman raised in Russia who returns to St. Petersburg and falls in love with the daughter of a hilar...

There are few novelists nowadays, I suppose, who will not readily acknowledge that, in certain most intrinsic qualities of the art, the great Russians are what Henry James once called Balzac, the masters of us all. To many readers of the western world, however, there was—there still is, despite the blinding glare which the Russian disaster has shed on the national character—a recurring sense of bewilderment in trying to trace the motives of the strange, seductive and incoherent people who ...

Pyotr Nikolayevich Krasnov (1869-1947) was Lieutenant General of the Russian army when the revolution broke out in 1917 and one of the leaders of the counterrevolutionary White movement afterward. According to its introduction, From Double Eagle to Red Flag "was born of the debris of Imperial Russia, conceived in the shadow of Leo Tolstoy's historical narrative, by a Russian General with exceptional opportunities." This "monumental" novel "has a naked, a terrible fascination."

From the preface written by Edith Wharton: Then I fell upon Futility. Some one said: “It's another new novel about Russia” –and every one of my eager feelers curled up in a tight knot of refusal. But . . . I read on, amused, moved, absorbed, till the tale and the journey ended together. This, it seems to me, is the most striking quality of Mr. Gerhardi's book: that he has enough of the true novelist's “objectivity” to focus the two so utterly alien races to whom he belongs almost equally, ...