Peter I. Volume 1

The death of young Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich could have led Russia to repeat the Time of Troubles. Although the Romanov dynasty was not threatened by extinction, the supporters of the two younger brothers of the deceased nearly unleashed a civil war, but in the end reached a rather bloody compromise, under which Ivan V and Peter I took the throne simultaneously, while their older sister Sophia ruled for them. Such was the prologue to the era that Russia would complete as a great power, with Peter as emperor. Readers of the first volume will follow the young tsar from the Red Porch of the Faceted Chamber, where many of his close ones perished in the Strelets uprising of 1682, to the morning of the Strelets execution in 1698... The reissue of the unfinished novel by the outstanding Russian and Soviet writer A. N. Tolstoy is accompanied by a scientific foreword by N. I. Pavlenko – a doctor of historical sciences and, perhaps, the best biographer of Peter I. The text of the novel is accompanied by thematic illustrations by the great artist I. Ya. Bilibin.