Glorious Misadventures
Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Descrição da editora
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, two great European empires met on the far side of the world. Conquistadores from Russia and Spain had been moving towards each other across the wildernesses of Siberia and the New World for centuries. Now one Russian aristocrat and adventurer greedily eyed the last great unclaimed imperial prize on earth - North America's Pacific Coast.
Nikolai Rezanov - diplomat, courtier, millionaire and gambler - was an imperial dreamer who set out to transform the precarious fur-hunting stations of the Alaskan coast into the hub of a Russian colony stretching from Siberia to California. His quest led him to San Francisco, where he became captivated by Conchita, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Spanish Governor, who embodied his dreams of both love and empire. More remarkable still, Rezanov's plan very nearly succeeded - by 1818, the easternmost settlements of the Tsar's dominions were in Sonoma County, California, and on the islands of Hawaii.
Glorious Misadventures traces Rezanov's dream of a Russian-American empire from the intrigues of the court of Catherine the Great to the wilds of the New World. Travelling in Rezanov's footsteps, Owen Matthews conjures a brilliantly original portrait of one of Russia's most eccentric empire-builders, both a visionary and a failure, a hero and a scoundrel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Matthews, a Newsweek editor and Russia specialist, follows in the footsteps of the eccentric Rezanov, illuminating the story of the Russian American Company, whose early-19th-century land claims stretched from the Aleutians to Northern California and included a short-lived Hawaiian colony. Russia's schemes for Pacific domination amounted to little more than a "string of lonely stockades and forts manned by a motley array of convicts, fur trappers and foreign desperadoes," and Rezanov, the driving force behind Russia's New World forays, grew increasingly erratic the longer he was away from St. Petersburg. The book's most memorable episode occurs not in America, however, but during Rezanov's disastrous mission to Japan. With his ship anchored off the coast during a weeks-long wait for the shogun's permission to land, he amused himself by urinating from the deck, in full view of curious locals. Humiliated by his eventual failure to establish diplomatic relations, he would later declare war on the country against the express orders of the czar. Matthews's humor, eye for detail, and voluminous knowledge of the historical context make this book a penetrating and enjoyable account of the exploration age and Russian society, from the imperial court to the wild frontier garrisons.
