The Story of Under-Officer Ivanov. The Destiny of the Palace Grenadier

Vladislav Mikhailovich Glinka is a writer and historian who served for many years as the chief custodian of the Department of the History of Russian Culture at the State Hermitage and had an excellent knowledge of the past. Glinka's remarkable works about people from the late 18th to the early 19th century are a model of precision in every detail concerning historical events and the forever-gone lifestyle of that time.
The dilogy covers events in Russia from 1818 to 1837 and is dedicated to the fate of a real person, a participant in the Patriotic War of 1812, Alexander Ivanov. The cavalryman Alexander Ivanov, conscripted from a Tula village, underwent years of brutal drill and participated in the suppression of the Decembrist uprising on Senate Square, set it as his life's goal to redeem his relatives from serfdom. On the pages of the book, we see not only the fellow soldiers of the hero but also famous historical figures — Nicholas I and Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Griboedov, Kondratiy Ryleev and Wilhelm Küchelbecker. The novels "The Story of Under-Officer Ivanov" and "The Destiny of the Palace Grenadier" present a vivid and accurate picture of the social structure of Tsarist Russia.