Pygmalion. The House Where Hearts Are Broken

The book includes two famous plays by George Bernard Shaw, an outstanding British innovative playwright, a founder (along with Ibsen and Chekhov) of the intellectual theater of the 20th century, Nobel Prize winner in literature and an Oscar winner. «Pygmalion» is the story of London phonetics professor Henry Higgins, who «created» a socialite from a street flower girl, and at the same time it is the story of the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, who forced Higgins to see in her not just material for an interesting experiment but a living person, which became the basis for the famous musical «My Fair Lady» (1956) and its Oscar-winning film adaptation (1964) starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. In «The House Where Hearts Are Broken», the quirky house-ship, where guests engage in continuous and fruitless debates about love and the meaning of life against the backdrop of the whistles and shouts of the host, the sage and madman Captain Shotover, gradually grows into a symbolic image of the old world, entering a new century and standing on the brink of ruin.