19th century
Showing 2,087 works across all media from the 19th century
War and Peace
Five families carried through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with battle, marriage, farming, and a theory of history held in one design. You finish it knowing these people better than your own friends.
Symphony No. 9
Amateur players filled out the orchestra at the premiere after only two rehearsals, and the singers complained that the high notes were unsingable.
The Brothers Karamazov
Old Karamazov is murdered and each of his three sons had reason. Around the crime Dostoevsky stages the fiercest argument fiction has ever made about God and the suffering of children.
Anna Karenina
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer while, in the other half of the book, Levin farms and marries and worries about God. Tolstoy gives both lives the same total sympathy.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to prove he stands above ordinary morality, then comes apart as a magistrate circles him. It reads like a thriller and works like a confession.
Moby Dick
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
Starry Night
Van Gogh painted the churning sky and its eleven stars from a window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, partly from memory.
Middlemarch
Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar for the wrong reasons and a gifted doctor lets small compromises close around him. Eliot knows more about how people actually fail than any English novelist.
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy dislike each other on sight and spend the novel being wrong. Austen wrote conversation better than anyone in English, and readers return to it their whole lives.
Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary reads romances, takes lovers, and runs up debts trying to feel something in a provincial town. Flaubert weighed every sentence, and modern fiction's idea of style begins with him.
Liberty Leading the People
Liberty carries the tricolor over the barricade with a boy waving pistols beside her, painted within months of the revolution it shows.
The Third of May 1808
A lantern lights a man in a white shirt throwing his arms wide before the firing squad. Goya painted it six years later.
5th Symphony
Four notes, then half an hour that never lets up. It premiered in an under-rehearsed, freezing four-hour concert that nobody enjoyed.