This is the first novel by William Gerhardie, first published in 1922, and it was made famous by H. G. Wells, who described it as 'true, devastating - a wonderful book'.Based on Gerhardie's own experiences as a member of the British Military Mission to Siberia shortly after the October Revolution, Futility paints a picture of contemporary Russian society which deserves comparison with the writing of Chekhov. At the centre of the story is Nicolai Vasilievich, who trails across Russia in the wake of the British Mission in the perpetual and unrealistic hope of seeing his fortunes improve, even though they steadily deteriorate. In counterpoint to Nicolai's comic progression, Gerhardie tells the story of his narrator's hopeless love for Nina, the second of Nicolai's three bewitching adolescent daughters.'William Gerhardie is one of our immortals. He is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all came out of him.' Olivia Manning'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow

Futility: A novel on Russian themes (Penguin modern classics)

Literature & Fiction

Gerhardie, William Alexander

Contemporary

Penguin

God's Fifth Column is the last book of William Gerhardie. Well known in the 1920s and 1930s chiefly as a novelist (whose books were admired by Arnold Bennett, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others), Gerhardie fell mysteriously silent at the beginning of the Second World War and did not publish another book during the remaining thirty-seven years of his life. After his death the manuscript of this ambitious and unusual book was discovered among his papers and was skilfully edited for publication by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidedlsky. The novel itself is a biography of the age, 1890-1940, through which Gerhardie lived. For Gerhardie, it was the artists rather than orthodox historians, the men of imagination rather than of will, who were the true spokesmen for mankind; and it is through the artist's vision and the writer's use of language that he tries to bring the age into moral perspective. God's Fifth Column is one of the most remarkable works of this gifted writer.

God's fifth column: A biography of the age, 1890-1940

History

Hodder and Stoughton

My wife's the least of it: Or, Baldridge derelictes

Literary

Macdonald and Co

Of Mortal Love contains, for many critics and readers, the essence of all that is best in Gerhardie's writing, and Michael Holroyd, in his 'Preface', voices the suspicion that it is the author's own favourite among his books.   First published in 1936, Of Mortal Love is a simple love story, in the author's own words 'containing fresh love-lore and treating of the succeeding stages of transmutation of love erotic into love imaginative; of love entrancing into love unselfish; of love tender into love transfigured'. It is the story of Dinah, who was not born to live alone, and of Walter, Jim and Eric who loved, but proved unequal to her love. According to C. P. Snow, it is 'one of the most wonderful books of a generation'.

Of mortal love (Definitive revised edition of the works of William Gerhardie)

Macdonald Co.

The polyglots (Revised definitive edition of the works of William Gerhardie)

<p>. with dustjacket, 1973, bright clean copy, MacDonald</p>

Memoirs of a polyglot: The autobiography of William Gerhardie (The Revised definitive edition of the works of William Gerhardie)

First published under the title Jazz and Jasper in 1928, Doom was praised by Arnold Bennett for its 'wild and brilliant originality' and is remembered as William Gerhardie's wittiest and strangest novel. It is the story of Frank Dickin, an impoverished young novelist, and his involvement with an eccentric family of Russian emigres - in particular, their beautiful daughter Eva - and with an all-powerful newspaper magnate, Lord Ottercove (based on Gerhardie's friend Lord Beaverbrook), who takes Dickin on as a lost cause. This irrepressible comic mixture also involves a mad English lord who is bent on destroying the world - and, with an outrageous sleight of hand that only Gerhardie could manage, the novel slowly slips from social comedy toward apocalypse. 'A master of the ridiculous ... Doom seems like nothing else in the language.' Michael Holroyd 'I have talent, but he has genius.' Evelyn Waugh 'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow

Doom (Definitive revised editions of the works of William Gerhardie)

Humor & Satire

Anton Chehov: A critical study

The Polyglots

The Anglo-Russian author William Gerhardie was hailed by writers including Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh and others as a “genius,” and this, his long-out-of-print second novel, is generally acclaimed as his comic masterpiece—not to mention “the most influential English novel of the twentieth century,” according to William Boyd.It tells the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East during the turbulent years just after the First World War, which displaced them, and the Russian Revolution, which impoverished them.Recounted by a conceited young English cousin who visits during a military mission, the story is filled with a host of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters—depressives, obsessives, sex maniacs, and hypochondriacs—often forced to choose between absurdity and tragedy. Yet Gerhardie depicts them as both charming and poignant, as they each struggle for love and safety in tumultuous times . . . and the protagonist finds his conceit shredded as he falls head over heels in love with one of them.Gerhardie’s portraits of Europeans in exile, attempting to escape from the era’s upheavals, draws on his own experiences as an officer in the British Mission. He has summoned up a world adrift, where war and revolution have broken up the old order, but nothing has come to replace it. And he does it with unforgettable humor and a sharp eye for the absurd.Hilarious, poignant, panoramic in scope, The Polyglots redeems, from the Babel of the interwar period, a stirring vision of love and human sympathy.

The polyglots

Secker & Warburg in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain

Futility: A Novel On Russian Themes

Nabu Press

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