In 1852, the novelist and government bureaucrat Ivan Goncharov set sail on the frigate Pallada for a mission to closed-off Japan. This episode follows Goncharov as he encountered Africans and Asians across an imperial world dominated by the British, Dutch, and Spanish.
This episode is based on translations and information provided by Edyta M. Bojanowska, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)
Andrei and Natalia Chikhachev, middling nobles, spent their lives running their small estate of Dorozhaevo in Vladimir province and raising their family. In this...
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...
In 1904, a shepherd and his daughter created a new religion in the Altai mountain ranges, leading to a violent confrontation with Russian settlers...