From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars
One Family's Odyssey, 1768-1870
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:3rd Mar '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In a manuscript in a Russian archive, an anonymous German eyewitness describes what he saw in Moscow during Napoleon's Russian campaign. Who was this nameless memoirist, and what brought him to Moscow in 1812? The search for answers to those questions uncovers a remarkable story of German and Russian life at the dawn of the modern age. Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch (1768-1835), the manuscript's author, was a man always on the move and reinventing himself. He spent half his life in the Holy Roman Empire, and the other half in Russia. He was a barber-surgeon, an actor, and a merchant, as well as a Catholic, a Freemason, and a Lutheran pastor. He saw the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, founded a business that flourished for sixty years, and took part in the Enlightenment, the consumer revolution, the Pietist Awakening, and Russia's colonization of the Black Sea steppe. A restless wanderer and seeker, but also the progenitor of an influential merchant family, he was a characteristic figure both of the Age of Revolution and of the bourgeois era that followed. Presenting a broad panorama of life in the German lands and Russia from the Old Regime to modernity, this microhistory explores how individual people shape, and are shaped by, the historical forces of their time.
This is a remarkable book...The book has an almost encyclopedic character. Read this book. Cover to cover. Then give it to your colleagues, friends, students, postal carriers, and pets. Hopefully, someone among them will choose to emulate it. We need more books like this. * Paul W. Werth, The Russian Review *
The overall result of Martin's meticulous research and fascinating narrative is a highly original, compelling and kaleidoscopic picture of one extraordinary individual's journey through time and space in the context of the Age of Revolution. * Patrick O'Meara, Slavonic and East European Review *
Martin's account of Rosenstrauch's life nonetheless manages to weave together the [extant] sources into a riveting account of life across Central and Eastern Europe [in the] late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and will surely be an engaging read for scholars and students alike. * Catherine Gibson, Canadian-American Slavic Studies *
From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars is equally fascinating to read either as a novel à la Honoré de Balzac or as a manual in how to find the adequate source material to reconstruct the life story of an ordinary man. * Kristian Gerner, History: Reviews of New Books *
The magic of the book lies within its densely researched chapters, which I strongly recommend. Readers, like Rosenstrauch's theater audiences, will be much enlightened and even entertained. * Victoria Frede, H-Net Reviews *
Alexander M. Martin's From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768-1870 won the prestigious 2023 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, and deservedly so. The origin of this book is such an extraordinary example of historical detective work that it is worth retelling. * Russell E. Martin, The Kritika *
- Winner of Winner, 2023 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Shortlisted, 2022 Marc Raeff Prize, Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association for the year's best book in that field.
ISBN: 9780192844378
Dimensions: 240mm x 163mm x 30mm
Weight: 1g
416 pages