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 302 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 Trade Paperbacks. 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 Imperial Orgy written by Edgar Saltus and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 written by W. R. S. Ralston and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-04-07 with total page 466 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 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 Tsars and Imposters written by Daniel H. Shubin and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia in its "time of troubles," 1598-1613, is the subject of prolific freelance writer Shubin's new book. The author describes this work as his translation and adaptation into English of a variety of famous works, which he actually lists, a welcome departure from the common practice of a number of best-selling popular histories, such as Henri Troyat's Ivan le Terrible (1982), which shamelessly raided the pages of famous historians like N.M. Karamzin with scarcely a nod. However, Shubin's method does not conform to the standards of professional history, and it raises obvious questions about intended readership. In addition, the lack of any but discursive or informative footnotes makes it difficult to know who is being translated and adapted. Actually, The "author" (if that is the proper term here) has arranged the material better than one would expect, and even made it useful for totally uninformed readers just setting out to explore the subject. However it would be so much better for beginners to turn to complete translations of Shubin's sources, a number of which long have been available from Academic International Press.
Download or read book The Tsars written by Ronald Hingley and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Genetics and Malformations in Art written by Jürgen Kunze and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 134 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 Paperbacks. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains new translations of four of Pushkin's best works of fiction. The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a novel-length masterpiece which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the devices of the Russian fairy-tale. The introduction provides close readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context.
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 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 1016 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Peter and Alexis The Romance of Peter the Great written by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-08-14 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original.
Download or read book The Course of Russian History 5th Edition written by Melvin C. Wren and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in its fifth edition, this definitive history of the Russian land and people builds on its success as a fascinating survey of two thousand years of struggle to harness vast resources and talents into a powerful and cohesive nation. From its beginning as a savage and exotic land, Russia underwent a complex evolution of political, social, and religious forces--the barbarism of its internal conflicts in seeming contradiction with its goals to advance in the realms of technology, art, education, and high culture. From the conflicts of the fantastically wealthy ruling class to the poor and oppressed masses emerged the Communist party and the enigmatic figures whose charismatic manipulation of political power reflected the myriad rulers before them. Finally, as the modern world watched, this great entity collapsed in a devastatingly brief time, millennia of precarious conflict proving too much for the tenuous coalescence of twentieth-century politics. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this text presents students with a comprehensive look at the momentous events and legendary figures which helped shape Russia's turbulent history.
Download or read book The Romanovs written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2016 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The acclaimed author of Young Stalin and Jerusalem gives readers an accessible, lively account--based in part on new archival material--of the extraordinary men and women who ruled Russia for three centuries."--NoveList.
