Letters From Russia

The Marquis de Custine's unique perspective on a vast, fascinating country in the grip of oppressive tyranny In 1839, encouraged by his friend Balzac, Custine set out to explore Russia. His impressions turned into what is perhaps the greatest and most influential of all books about Russia under the Tsars. Rich in anecdotes as much about the court of Tsar Nicholas as the streets of St Petersburg, Custine is as brilliant writing about the Kremlin as he is about the great northern landscapes. An immediate bestseller on publication, Custine's book is also a central book for any discussion of 19th century history, as - like de Tocqueville's Democracy in America - it dramatizes far broader questions about the nature of government and society.

The Marquis de Custine’s record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world’s most fascinating and troubled countries. It is also a wonderful piece of travel writing. Custine, who met with people in all walks of life, including the Czar himself, offers vivid descriptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow, of life at court and on the street, and of the impoverished Russian countryside. But together with a wealth of sharply delineated incident and detail, Custine’s great work also presents an indelible picture—roundly denounced by both Czarist and Communist regimes—of a country crushed by despotism and “intoxicated with slavery.” Letters from Russia, here published in a new edition prepared by Anka Muhlstein, the author of the Goncourt Prize-winning biography of Custine, stands with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a profound and passionate encounter with historical forces that are still very much at work in the world today.

Art and Diplomacy is the study of decorative art employed by the English Crown to enhance royal letters to Russia and the Far East in the seventeenth-century.

From 1907 untill 1913 Ouspensky wrote fairly regularly for a Russian newspaper, mostly on foreign affairs. At the same t i m e he was working on various books based on the idea that our consciousness is an incomplete state not far removed from sleep, and also that our three-dimensional view of the universe is inadequate and incomplete. Hoping that answers to some of the questions he had posed might have been found by more ancient civilisations, he made an extensive tour of Egypt, Ceylon and India. On his return Ouspensky learnt that Russia was at war. For a time impending events did not prevent him from lecturing about his travels to very large audiences in St. Petersburg and Moscow. But in 1917 while revolution was spreading through all the Russias, and the Bolsheviks were establishing their reign of terror, Ouspensky was living in various temporary quarters in South Russia, incondtions of great danger and hardship. Until he managed to reach Turkey in 1920 he and those around him were completely cut off from the outside world, unable to receive or send news even as far as the next town, constantly on the alert to avoid being picked up and murdered by the Bolsheviks. In 1919 Ouspensky somehow found a way to send a series of articles to the New Age, which, under the skilful editorship of A. R. Orage, was the leading literary, artistic and cultural weekly paper published in England. These five articles appeared in six instalments as ‘Letters from Russia’. They give a detached but horrific description of the total breakdown of public order, and are reprinted here for the first time. A remarkable feature of the ‘Letters’ is that while the revolution was in progress and the Bolshevik regime not fully established, Ouspensky foresaw with unusual clarity the inevitability of the tyranny described by Solzhenitsyn fifty years later. During the winter of 1919 and the spring of 1920 C. E. Bechhofer (afterwards known as Bechhofer-Roberts) was observing events in Russia as a British correspondent who spoke Russian and had previous experience of the country and people. He had met Ouspensky before 1914, both in Russia and in India; he was a regular contributor to the New Age and had himself translated the first of Ouspensky’s ‘Letters from Russia’, written in July 1919. In Bechhofer’s book In Denikin’s Russia the author describes the week or two he spent with Ouspensky and Zaharov above a sort of barn at Rostov-on-the-Don. With its pathos and humour this passage makes a fitting epilogue to Ouspensky’s smuggled ‘Letters’.

This collection examines the letters of Anton Chekhov, which have received relatively little scholarly attention. The contributors approach the letters from a variety of angles—biography, psychology, literary criticism, poetics, and history—to characterize Chekhov’s key epistolary concerns and to examine their role in his life.