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)
In this episode, we examine the history of lèse-majesté (insulting the honour of the tsar, his family, and his image) in imperial Russia through...
A ghost was plaguing the household of Father Ioann Solov'ev, the parish priest of the tiny hamlet of Lychentsy, in November 1900...floating objects, strange...
Tales from Imperial Russia is a fortnightly podcast narrating ordinary and extraordinary lives from the Russian Empire. In short episodes, we will avoid the...