Review
"- 'Nothing less than a masterpiece... the perfect companion for the intending traveller, bringing the city's every aspect vividly alive.' Fitzroy Maclean, Sunday Times - 'A magic lantern on place and people: Russians and foreigners; major events in Russian history in eye-witness immediacy; so vivid a book that you need not hasten to travel there yourself; and certainly should not hasten when you arrive.' Gay Firth, Financial Times - 'Enthralling reading... a well-balanced selection that affords marvellous glimpses of its grandeur and its grimness, its magnificence and its horrors.' Elisabeth de Stroumillo, Daily Telegraph - 'Even for those who may never visit Leningrad, this book will be a source of enjoyment and interest.' Denis J. B. Shaw, British Book News
Product Description
Featuring a vivid selection from biographies, novels, letters, poems, diaries and memoirs, this volume traces the story of St Petersburg from earliest times. Through these pieces, readers can observe the city's foundation by Peter the Great, on the marshy shores of the Gulf of Finland. First hand accounts tell of the 1825 Decembrists standing in the snow in Senate Square, refusing to accept Nicholas I as Tsar, being shot down where they stood; of the imprisonment of Dostoevsky and the duel that killed Pushkin; of the last moments of the mad Emperor Paul; and of the storming of the Winter Palace by the crowd in 1917.
