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'It was like walking along the knife-edge of the highest possible mountain range, seeing life on one side and death on the other in the form of two deep, gorgeous and gleaming seascapes.'
This astonishing novella from 1908, newly translated for Little Black Classics by War and Peace translator Anthony Briggs, probes the emotions and experiences of seven people condemned to death in Tsarist Russia. A powerful and subtle exploration of the morality of capital punishment, it was a bestseller at the time, and, in a strange quirk of history, influenced the conspirators in the cataclysmic assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.
128 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1908
Time had gone, it seemed to have been converted into space – translucent and airless – a vast physical area with everything there upon it, the earth, life and people, and all of it could be absorbed at a single glance, all of it right up to the end, to the very edge of mystery, to death itself. Some sacrilegious hand had drawn aside the age-old curtain hiding the mystery of life and the mystery of death, rendering them no longer mysterious, though still incomprehensible. It was like a truth engraved in a foreign language. His human brain had no access to the concepts, and his human speech had no access to the words, needed to capture what he had seen.
And in this solemn silence, broken by the mournful tolling of the departing minutes, separated from all that lives, five human beings, two women and three men, waited for the advent of night, of dawn and the execution, and all of them prepared for it, each in his or her own way.


