In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the dead tsar Alexander I. The myth and its staying power are rooted in several sources, not least the peculiar circumstances of the emperor's death and popular conceptions of monarchy.
Source
M. P. Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon (trans. S. Emanuel. DeKalb: NIU Press, 2016)
In the 1890s, the tiny village of Ashchepkovo in western Russia was struck by an epidemic of demonic possession. This episode attempts to understand...
In 1817, Agustín José Pedro del Carmen Domingo de Candelaria de Betancourt y Molina (known in Russian as Avgustin Betankur) surveyed the site of...
The 1804/1818 song collection of Kirsha Danilov introduced the Russian reading public, in many ways for the first time, to the people's immensely rich...