Eighteen-year-old German stonemason Jakob Walter served in the Grand Army of Napoleon between 1806 and 1813. His diary intimately records his trials: the long, grueling marches in Prussia and Poland, the disastrous Russian campaign, and the demoralizing defeat in a war few supported or understood. It is at once a compelling chronicle of a young soldier's loss of innocence and an eloquent and moving portrait of the profound effects of all wars on the men who fight them.

Also included are letters home from the Russian front, previously unpublished in English, as well as period engravings and...

Marc Raeff investigates the early development of the Russian intelligentsia, a unique social and political force that was instrumental in westernizing its country and fermenting the revolutionary movement.

The dramatic events of the twentieth century have often led to the mass migration of intellectuals, professionals, writers, and artists. One of the first of these migrations occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when more than a million Russians were forced into exile. With this book, Marc Raeff, one of the world's leading historians of Russia, offers the first comprehensive cultural history of the "Great Russian Emigration." He examines the social and institutional structure of the emigration and describes its rich cultural and intellectual life. He points out that what...

The impression created by travelers, by historians and journalists, as well as by Russia's own discontented intelligentsia was that nothing really ever changed in Russia, that the autocracy was the same in 1905 as it had been at the death of Peter the Great in 1725.