Skirmish between cossacks and the imperial bodyguard, by Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille, (France 1848), painting, frontispiece

Russia Part I: Folk-tales and early history: Historical note

The imp and the crust, by Count Leo Tolstoy

The story of iron and the poison water, from the Kalevala

The country and customs of the Scythians (fifth century B.C.), by Herodotus

The vengeance of Queen Olga (about 945), from the chronicle of Nestor

Vladimir in search of a religion (about 988), by John S. C. Abbott

Russia Part II: In the days of Ivan the Terrible: Historical note

How Russia was freed from the Tartars (1480), by John S. C. Abbott

Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), by Frances A. Shaw

Life at the Setch (fifteenth century), by Nikolai V. Gogol

The false Czar (1605), by Frances A. Shaw

The kremlin of Moscow, by Bayard Taylor

Russia Part III: Peter the Great: Historical note

A morning with Peter the Great (early in the eighteenth century), by Dmitri Merejkowski

How St. Petersburg was built (1703), by John S. C. Abbott

A supposed letter from an English architect (1715), by Maurice Baring

Russia Part IV: From Catherine the Great to the invasion of Napoleon: Historical note

A day with Catherine the Great (1794), by Adrian Moyseevich Gribovski

Borodino (1812), by Alexander Sergeyevitch Pushkin