Fiction Story Briefs

Great novels are often connected-to (or based-on) real-life events. It's fun to search-for (and uncover) those connections. This Collection features fictional stories with real-life tie-ins.

This clip, from a 1968 Soviet-era adaptation of Brothers Karamazov (by Fydor Dostoevsky), depicts the scene (from the novel) in which Ivan Karamazov (...

Bob Cratchit and his family live in a part of London known as Camden Town. This image depicts an area of Camden during 1839.

Learn about barn spiders, orb webs and life on a farm in this story behind E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web."

This image - of children working in Britain's coal mines - is from an 1842 report prepared byLord Ashley(Anthony Ashley Cooper), later known asLord Sh...

The children, featured in this fountain, are dancing the Khorovod. The Khorovod is a type of common circle dance which Russian children loved to do b...

Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old grump of a man when he is visited by three ghosts (also called spirits). The Spirit of Christmas Present shows him ...

Two close friends, C.S. LewisandJ.R.R. Tolkien, debate the differences between myths and lies.

As Dante and Virgil reach the City of Dis, they see the flaming towers of a city seemingly on fire. Inhabitants of Dis wonder how these two individual...

Known as Dostoevsky's most-violent novel, "Demons" is based on a real-life murder which took place in 1869.

As Dante and Virgil make their way through the Inferno, they encounter demons with pitchforks. Although the pitchforks are raised, as if to attack, th...

Understanding Dante's Inferno becomes much-easier when we view illustrations by an artist like Gustave Dore.

An unknown miniaturist, working in Venice during the 1340s, created this work illuminating a page from Dante’s Divine Comedy. The 14th-century m...

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