Bomb-throwing assassins, political repression and revolt, emigre revolutionaries infiltrated by a government spy: much of Under Western Eyes (1911) is more topical than we would wish. Set in Czarist Russia and in Geneva, and told through the Western eyes of Conrad's English narrator, we are
given a somber but not entirely pessimistic view of the human dilemmas which are born of oppression and violence. It is by common critical consent, one of Conrad's finest novels.