The Czar

Russia in the time of Alexander I and the first Napoleon, seen through a serf boy named Ivan: his sleeping village, the chance that teaches him to read, the lot that sends him to the army, and the year when half a million men marched on Moscow. Deborah Alcock wrote historical novels with a Protestant purpose and read the memoirs of the period for this one; the gulf between serf and boyar, and what the war did to it, is the real subject. Fifty-nine plates of Russian winter, religious procession, and Moscow courtyard, including work by Ilya Repin and Vasily Polenov, give the novel's world in paint.