Max Hayward Book order (chronological)

The dissertation posits that ethics is inherently mind-dependent, emerging from human interactions and the need for mutually sympathetic coexistence. It challenges traditional philosophical views that treat ethical foundations as theoretical, arguing instead that choosing a metaethical stance is a significant moral decision. The author advocates for anti-realism, suggesting that seeking objective moral truths undermines the importance of interpersonal relationships. By framing morality as a collective creation, the work emphasizes the relevance of ethical norms and the objectives of moral inquiry.

This modern classic by Boris Pasternak follows the events of the Russian Revolution and of life in the young Soviet Union up to about 1939. The story is a personal account, illustrated mostly by the effects of the Revolution on the main character in the novel, Yury Zhivago. We follow the changes in Zhivago's life, and the lives of those whom he comes in contact. So it is more than a historical report - it is a very human novel.

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.

English, Russian (translation)