Walter Scott

Count Robert of Paris, condemned by Scott's printer as 'altogether a failure', was later prepared for publication by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart , and his publisher Robert Cadell. What appeared was a bowdlerised, tamed and tidied version of what Scott had written and dictated. This edition, the first to have returned to the manuscript and to the many surviving proofs, realises Scott's original intentions. Scott's last full novel has many roughnesses, but it also challenges the susceptibilities of his readers more directly than any other and in that lay its fault in the eyes of the lesser men who condemned it.

Valter Skott - odin iz velichajshikh pisatelej mirovoj literatury, istorik, voskresivshij davno proshedshie epokhi, i znatok chelovecheskikh serdets. Po motivam ego romanov khudozhniki sozdavali kartiny, kompozitory - opery. "Chitaju Valter Skotta i Bibliju", - pisal Pushkin zhene iz Boldina (rech, kstati, shla o predstavlennom v nastojaschem izdanii romane "Ajvengo", vo frantsuzskom perevode). Belinskij nazyval V. Skotta "Kolumbom v sfere iskusstva". "Shekspirom i Gomerom" istoricheskogo romana. Svoim uchitelem schital pisatelja Balzak. "Ajvengo" - kljuchevoe proizvedenie v tsikle romanov V. Skotta, kotorye perenosjat nas v srednevekovuju Angliju. Junomu rytsarju Ajvengo, tajkom vernuvshemusja iz Krestovogo pokhoda na rodinu i volej ottsa lishennomu nasledstva, predstoit otstojat svoju chest i ljubov prekrasnoj ledi Roveny... Na pomosch emu pridut korol Richard Lvinoe Serdtse i legendarnyj razbojnik Robin Gud.

Castle Dangerous is the realisation of a thirty-year old project of Scott's to retell a story found in Barbour's Brus. Set in the early fourteenth century during the Scottish Wars of Independence, an English knight for a love wager commits himself to defend Douglas Castle against Scottish attempts to retake it. The ballad-like story embraces intriguing elements including national rivalry, and the idealisation and betrayal of love. The Douglas area, seen as an almost surrealist landscape of ravines, trenches, and tombs, and in abysmal weather, forms an appropriate setting for an impressively bleak narrative.