Browse Items (73 total)

This is the history of Russia before the founding of St. Petersburg ... Published originally as Of the Russe Common Wealth, 1591, this is the second edition of the first English book about Russia. Well more than a century before Sankt Pieter Burkh…

Kyrie Eleison...Lord Have Mercy... The following list of complaints and the engraving on the right provide the reader with the English view of Russian Orthodoxy: Of the Muscovites and the Russians The Muscovites, and Russians as they were converted…

Patron Saint of "Russian" Librarians... Friedrich von Adelung was a Prussian historian, linguist, and bibliographer, a.k.a. Fedor Pavlovich Adelung when he pulled up roots and moved to Russia at age 26. He was dubbed patron saint of Russian…

This is the history of Russia after the founding of St. Petersburg... although that's not quite true, because although it was written after the founding, Lomonosov's History takes us only to the year 1054. Maybe the reason for the discrepancy in size…

All of 6-foot-6 in Stocking Feet... The following quotation is from the column, "Who am I? Test your biography I.Q.," in the pop-magazine Biography for Jan. 2002: One of the most controversial figures in Russian history, I brought many reforms to my…

Beginning of Russian Bibliographical Statistics... The Great Soviet Encyclopedia adopts as Russians many of the European admirers of St. P. who spent much of their lives in Russia. H. F. Storch, a German born in Riga and called Andrei Karlovich…

Coming in 1703 to a Swamp Near You... In the 10th century the marshes where Sankt Pieter Burkh would begin to be built almost 800 years later were a part of Novgorod land, originally the area around Lake Il'men, home to the Il'men Slavs. The town of…

Put Her in a Pumpkin Shell... The palatial Peterhof or Petrodvorets, Peter's favorite home, was 30 versts or about 20 miles from the old St. Petersburg. Was it indeed still part of larger Petersburg today? We discovered that although it's still…

The Emperor's Wearing Clothes! An Internet search under August Racinet will bring up beautiful reprints of Le costume historique, a prime resource for theatrical designers. This set is of the "Grand édition," published in 1888, the plates in…

Positively antediluvian; or, Floods looking for a city ... Long before the founding of St. Petersburg, Europeans looked towards Russia like rabbits casing the carrot patch, especially those travelers such as Sigmund von Herberstein in the 16th and…