This remarkable novel, the first by Merejkowski on a purely Russian theme, completes the already famous historical Trilogy, of which The Death of the Gods, and The Forerunner, or Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, were the two former instalments. For some account of the author, and of the main idea underlying the Trilogy, the reader is referred to the English preface to The Death of the Gods.

These novels, which may be read independently of each other, have been very successfully translated into all the principal European languages; and the exclusively authorized English translations of them, published in England by Messrs. Archibald Constable, and in the United States by Messrs. Putnam, are being again issued in new editions respectively in both countries.

The present translation, although it is feared much like Heine’s “stuffed moonbeam,” has been made direct from the Russian original, and pains have not been spared to render it exact. Thanks are due to Mr. W. R. Morfill, Reader in Russian to the University of Oxford, for his kind assistance on one or two difficult points.

A word of explanation is due to the English and American public with regard to the purpose of the present work.

No one who knows Merejkowski personally, no one who reads his story with a fair mind, will imagine for a moment that it is written to please or to amuse the “young person.” It is intended for men and women. It is a simple and earnest psychological study of the most moving episode in the life of the greatest of the Romanoff princes. It is a sketch, vivid and true, of classes and conditions,—of court and society,—of peasants and wild religious beliefs—in Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As regards the bulk of her population she has not materially changed.

Russia at that time lay in a position relative to Europe precisely analogous to that occupied by Japan thirty-five years ago. The vaster country, as the reader will see, was beginning, through the person of its sovereign, humbly to learn of the civilised West, just as Japan began to do so also through her sovereign’s efforts in 1868.

But in this book a strange additional feature of interest for the present moment is a psychological feature. The character of the Romanoff family is a persistent one; and in the course of this novel, with its single terrific scene, dull indeed will be the reader who does not step by step more clearly discern in the soul of the luckless Alexis the very lineaments and complexion of Nicholas, the now living occupant of the Russian throne. This is the key to the book. Possibly before another year has expired, perhaps even before these words are being read, he will occupy the throne no longer; and the forces that may remove him would be essentially the same forces as those which decided the fate of Alexis.

London, September, 1905.