Download or read book The Tsar s Dwarf written by Peter H. Fogtdal and published by Hawthorne Books. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel about the aberration and endurance of the human condition translated by Tiina Nunnally. Soerine, a deformed female dwarf from Denmark, is given as a gift to the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great because he is taken by her freakishness and intellect. Against her will Peter takes her to St. Petersburg where she becomes a jester in his court, Forced to live a life that both compels and repels her, she gives in to the attentions of the Tsar’s favorite dwarf, Lukas and carves out an existence for herself amidst the squalor and lice-ridden life of dwarfs in early 18th century. Disaster eventually strikes in the shape of a priest who wants to “save” her.
Download or read book Secret Lives of the Tsars written by Michael Farquhar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Michael Farquhar doesn’t write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.”—Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist Scandal! Intrigue! Cossacks! Here the world’s most engaging royal historian chronicles the world’s most fascinating imperial dynasty: the Romanovs, whose three-hundred-year reign was remarkable for its shocking violence, spectacular excess, and unimaginable venality. In this incredibly entertaining history, Michael Farquhar collects the best, most captivating true tales of Romanov iniquity. We meet Catherine the Great, with her endless parade of virile young lovers (none of them of the equine variety); her unhinged son, Paul I, who ordered the bones of one of his mother’s paramours dug out of its grave and tossed into a gorge; and Grigori Rasputin, the “Mad Monk,” whose mesmeric domination of the last of the Romanov tsars helped lead to the monarchy’s undoing. From Peter the Great’s penchant for personally beheading his recalcitrant subjects (he kept the severed head of one of his mistresses pickled in alcohol) to Nicholas and Alexandra’s brutal demise at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Secret Lives of the Tsars captures all the splendor and infamy that was Imperial Russia. Praise for Secret Lives of the Tsars “An accessible, exciting narrative . . . Highly recommended for generalists interested in Russian history and those who enjoy the seamier side of past lives.”—Library Journal (starred review) “An excellent condensed version of Russian history . . . a fine tale of history and scandal . . . sure to please general readers and monarchy buffs alike.”—Publishers Weekly “Tales from the nasty lives of global royalty . . . an easy-reading, lightweight history lesson.”—Kirkus Reviews “Readers of this book may get a sense of why Russians are so tolerant of tyrants like Stalin and Putin. Given their history, it probably seems normal.”—The Washington Post
Download or read book The Tsars written by Alexander Ivanov and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tsars of Russia reigned as absolute monarchs long past the time when the authority of other sovereigns had been curtailed. Here, historian Alexander Ivanov reveals their fears and betrayals, privilege and debauchery, conspiracies and rivalries, love and tragedy as they forged Russia into one of the world's greatest empires. No ruler in history has embodied the oppressive domination of these rulers more vividly than Alexander Ivanov's opening subject, Tsar Ivan IV, the first of all the Russian tsars, known to history as Ivan the Terrible. Although a gifted ruler who did much to unite and improve the conditions in his primitive country, Ivan was also a notorious sadist who delighted in torturing and murdering anyone who displeased him. Ivan's death in 1584 ushered in the Time of Troubles, thirty-five years of famine, plague, and war that crippled the nation. A series of rulers attempted to cope with the devastation, beginning with Ivan's successor Boris Godunov. Finally, grasping for stability, Russia's nobles begged young Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of Ivan's beloved wife Anastasia, to take the throne. Michael successfully united the war-torn and ravaged nation and founded a dynasty that would rule for 300 years. The Romanov line produced Russia's most brilliant yet most unconventional sovereign: Peter the Great, a towering figure of a man whose restless, creative mind led him on an inexorable quest to modernize and civilize the still backward nation. The reforms he enacted so enraged nobles and peasants alike that Peter had to quash a series of rebellions to keep his crown. Ruthlessly stifling dissent and massacring rebels, he ultimately cowed the Russian people into submission, achieving a legacy that nearly equaled his ambitions. It was left to a woman - and a foreigner, at that - to lead the nation further out of the darkness. German princess Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, known to the world as Catherine the Great, absorbed the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and applied them to a country built on the backs of millions of serfs. However ineffective some of her policies, in the end, she made Russia a major player on the European stage. Serfdom was finally abolished in the nineteenth century, but it would be decades before Russian peasants could own land of their own and learn to farm it productively. The boyars and tsars clung to power until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The sad fate of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, marked the end of the absolute power that Ivan the Terrible had so exploited. The abuses would continue but under a new and drastically different form of government.
Download or read book The Songs of the Russian People written by William Ralston Shedden Ralston and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Songs of the Russian People as Illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Social Life written by W ..... R ..... S ..... Ralston and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Songs of the Russian People written by W. R. S. Ralston and published by Ardent Media. This book was released on with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Songs of the Russian People written by W. R. S. Ralston and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia Britannica written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 1126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Tsars and Imposters written by Daniel H. Shubin and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Boris Godunov governed from the shadows during the 13-year reign of the borderline-retarded Tsar Feodor Ivanovich, heir to Tsar Ivan IV, and then for almost seven years in his own name. But by then the brutal death of the 9-year-old Tsarevich Dmitri Ivanovich by GodunoväaA's henchmen, and the effects of his Oprichniki "security forces" on Russian society, had taken their toll. In the absence of a clearäaA line of succession, false princes were put forward by rivals, including the Poles, and proponents of these "False Dmitris" and other contenders only fanned the flames. This was an era when "Get thee to the nunnery!" was a light sentence; enemies who were not forced to retire from the worldly life were brutally tortured and removed from the world altogether. Add to that the political machinations entailed in the creation of the Russian Patriarchate and Job, Russia's first patriarch, entirely indebted to the Crown. This 'Time of Troubles' wound to a close only after a new and lasting dynasty was established under Mikhail Romanov. This is an original translation from classic Russian sources, principally Karamzin, Kostomarov, Skrynnikov, Solovyov, Tatishchev."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book The New Encyclopaedia Britannica written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 1016 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Queen of Spades and Other Stories written by Alexander Pushkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories. In this classic literary representation of gambling, Alexander Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. Hints of the occult and gothic alternate with scenes of St Petersburg high-society in the story of the passionate Hermann's quest to master chance and make his fortune at the card-table. Underlying the taut plot is an ironical treatment of the romantic dreamer and social outcast. This volume contains three other major works of Pushkin's fiction, moving from the witty parodies of sentimentalism and high melodrama in The Tales of Belkin to an early experiment with recreating the past in Peter the Great's Blackamoor. It concludes with the novel-length masterpiece The Captain's Daughter, which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the colour and devices of the Russian fairy-tale in a narrative of rebellion and romance. These new translations, as well as being meticulously faithful to the original, do full justice to the elegance and fluency of Pushkin's prose. The Introduction provides insightful readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context. A chronology of the Pugachov Uprising illuminates the events in The Captain's Daughter. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book The New Encyclopaedia Britannica Micropaedia written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 1016 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Encyclop dia Britannica Microp dia written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 1018 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Moscow Moscow written by Christopher Hope and published by William Heinemann. This book was released on 1990 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the author provides a funny and thought-provoking personal response to Moscow. He found the city similar to South Africa - a world on edge, with tensions and an appetite for the grotesque common to all repressive societies. Christopher Hope also wrote the novel, White Boy Running.
Download or read book Encylopedia Britannica written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 1122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Encyclop dia Britannica written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 1014 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.1-12 Micropaedia: Ready reference -- V.13-29 Macropaedia: Knowledge in depth -- V.[30] Propaedia: Outline of knowledge -- V.[31] Index, A-K -- V.[32] Index, L-Z.
Download or read book The New Encyclop dia Britannica Microp dia written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 1022 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopedia includes a two-volume index, a 12-volume Micropaedia (Ready reference), a 17-volume Macropaedia (Knowledge in depth), and the Propaedia.
