Peter I. Volume 3. Historians and Contemporaries About Peter the Great and His Era

Contemporaries began to realize the greatness of Peter I while he was still alive and long before he was officially given the title of "The Great." The classics of historical thought assessed the first Russian emperor differently, but none doubted the scale of his personality and the fateful consequences of his deeds. The French aristocrat Duke de Saint-Simon, the Danish envoy Just Yul, and the Breton nobleman François Guimo de Vilbois (also known as Russian Vice-Admiral Nikita Petrovich Vilboi) all personally knew Peter I. While the first of this list did not really communicate with the Russian tsar, he did not hold back on admiration in his memoirs. The last was entrusted to be the best man at the wedding of Peter and Catherine, later he did not hesitate to give his account of the emperor's death a tone of vile pamphleteering. Russian historians N.I. Kostomarov, S.M. Solovyov, V.O. Klyuchevsky, and M.N. Pokrovsky studied the Petrine era mostly using the same documents, but paradoxically they sometimes arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions. Readers of the third volume will have a unique opportunity to explore the full spectrum of opinions and form their own.

You will learn:
- How did historians of the 19th–20th centuries assess Peter the Great?
- Unknown details of the life of the first emperor
- Eyewitness accounts of Peter I: from admiration to criticism.