Sketches Of Russian Life Before And During The Emancipation Of The Serfs

Excerpt from Sketches of Russian Life: Before and During the Emancipation of the SerfsThe author of this book, hurt in a railway accident when paying a short visit to England a few years ago, became a patient of the able surgeon and warm hearted gentleman to whom he desires gratefully to dedicate his volume.That surgeon, an old friend of mine, presently afterwards wrote to me that he had met with a gen tleman who knew more than most travellers of Rus sian Life; not only because he had lived long in Russia, and in its remoter parts as much as in the capital, but chiefly because he knew how to observe and seize at once the point of any character or inci dent. He had been persuaded to jot down some of his experiences, and here they were; surely, my friend thought, genuine enough to be worth public attention.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Over the course of more than three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia, foreign visitors and residents produced a vast corpus of literature conveying their experiences and impressions of the country. The product of years of painstaking research by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, In the Lands of the Romanovs is the realization of a major bibliographical project that records the details of over 1200 English-language accounts of the Russian Empire. Ranging chronologically from the accession of Mikhail Fedorovich in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, this is the most comprehensive bibliography of first-hand accounts of Russia ever to be published. Far more than an inventory of accounts by travellers and tourists, Anthony Cross’s ambitious and wide-ranging work includes personal records of residence in or visits to Russia by writers ranging from diplomats to merchants, physicians to clergymen, gardeners to governesses, as well as by participants in the French invasion of 1812 and in the Crimean War of 1854-56. Providing full bibliographical details and concise but informative annotation for each entry, this substantial bibliography will be an invaluable tool for anyone with an interest in contacts between Russia and the West during the centuries of Romanov rule.