From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars is equally fascinating to read either as a novel `a la Honor'e de Balzac or as a manual in how to find the adequate source material to reconstruct the life story of an ordinary man.
Alexander M. Martin is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries:Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (1997) and Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855 (2013).