Browse Items (73 total)

Crime and Punishment ... Austria's attitude towards pre-Peterburgian but nevertheless Petrine Russia can be seen in this diary of the journey to Moscow of the Count of Guarient and his secretary to the mission, Johann Georg Korb. While Peter was on a…

The Grand Inquisitor... Peter the Great had no love for Catholicism, but in the early days of his reign he showed deference to the church. Unfortunately his reforms did little to improve conditions for Catholics, and under Catherine II their…

From the Land of the South Slavs... Published in Vienna, this calendar of the world's happenings from its beginnings uses the Russian civil alphabet, introduced to the Russians by Peter The Great. The author, Serbian school teacher, writer,…

The News From Lake Ladoga... Arthur Sketchley is the pseudonym of English dramatist, novelist, and entertainer George Rose. His "Mrs. Brown" novels – 32 volumes in all – purport to be the slightly dotty ravings and rantings of an…

A Gentle Soul... Before the Industrial Revolution St. Petersburg's visibly wealthy lived side by side with her hidden impoverished, often in the front and the back of the same building! This "illusion" of what the city represented, the pretense that…

Lambs to the Slaughter; or, I Love Your Hat... Both the French and the Germans were intrigued with Russian military uniforms and with good reason. But one would think the tassels and plumes and chinstraps would have slowed a guy down and made him…

Mad Dogs and Englishmen... During Catherine's reign, the British had established themselves as a powerful minority in "Peterborough," as it was called by some of the Brits. They ran factories and were fully involved in the intellectual and social…

Ever The Twain Shall Meet. If one goes far enough west one will arrive at Petersburg's eastern back door, and by such machinations of the imagination we were able to include this beautiful aquatint of Tibet from a volume translated from the Chinese…

The Double... The statue of The Bronze Horseman (= Peter the Great, the inspired hero, rash, speedy, proud, majestic, handsome, and yes, six and a half feet tall in real life!) symbolized a powerful upsurge in Russian energy (and the horse and his…

Do Mind Your Grammar... The numbers of auslanders in St. Petersburg in the 18th century and later certainly fluctuated a great deal but there's little doubt that the Germans and French, followed closely by the English, were the dominant species. In…