Some thirty years ago considerable interest was aroused by the publication, in the Nouvelle Revue, of Letters dealing with the Society of the different European capitals. These letters were by Count Paul Vassili. They were clever, amusing, and, it must be owned, rather ill-natured letters. People wondered at the extraordinary amount of truth which they contained, at the secrets they revealed. The real name of their author to this day has never been disclosed; yet Count Vassili existed. He held an important post at the Russian Court, he had travelled widely, and everywhere had been welcomed as befitted his rank in the world. Cynical, intelligent, and wonderfully observant of everything that went on around him, his greatest interest in life was to commit to the leaves of a diary all that he saw or heard. That diary, which stretches from the time of the Crimean War to the present year, it was his intention to publish before he died. Alas, death came too soon. The Count passed away a few months ago. Nevertheless, the volumes which contained this diary became accessible, and their contents are now given to the public with the conviction that they will be read with the same interest that always attended the writings of Count Vassili. At the same time, we would warn the reader that the present volume is not historical, but merely anecdotal. Yet sometimes anecdotes are also history. They very often explain events wide in their influence over the affairs of the world in general and Royal Houses in particular, which at first sight seem extraordinary, whilst, in reality, they are but the development of some small circumstance.
This is one of the few books in a Western language devoted to the social history of the dispossessed and disaffected masses in Russia before the nineteenth century...An intelligent rendering of the social history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In March 1921 the sailors of Kronstadt, the naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland, rose in revolt against the Bolshevik government, which they themselves had helped into power. Under the slogan of Òfree soviets,'' they established a revolutionary commune that survived for sixteen days, until an army came across the ice to crush it. After a savage struggle, the rebels were subdued. Paul Avrich vividly describes the uprising and examines it in the context of the development of the Soviet state. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Tolle Lege, take up and read! These words from St. Augustine perfectly describe the human condition. Reading is the universal pilgrimage of the soul. In reading we journey to find ourselves and to save ourselves. The ultimate journey is reading the Great Books. In the Great Books we find the struggle of the human soul, its aspirations, desires, and failures. Through reading, we find faces and souls familiar to us even if they lived a thousand years ago. The unread life is not worth living, and in reading we may well discover what life is truly about and prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage of life.
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