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    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Unavailable
    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Unavailable
    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Ebook549 pages9 hours

    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

    By Owen Matthews

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9781408833988
    Unavailable
    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Author

    Owen Matthews

    Owen Matthews studied Modern History at Oxford University before beginning his career as a journalist in Bosnia. He has written for the Moscow Times, The Times, the Spectator and the Independent. In 1997, he became a correspondent at Newsweek magazine in Moscow where he covered the second Chechen war, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. His first book on Russian history, Stalin's Children, was translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for The Guardian First Books Award and France's Prix Medicis. Owen's first book on Russian history was Stalin's Children, a family memoir, which was published to great critical acclaim in 2008. The book was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Orwell Prize for political writing, and selected as one of the Books of the Year by the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages and was shortlisted for France's Medici Prize and French Elle Magazine's Grand Prix Litteraire, as well as being selected as one of the FNAC chain's twenty featured titles for the Rentree Litteraire of 2009. Owen is currently a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, based in Istanbul and Moscow.

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    • 5/5
      This is one of the most entertaining histories I have ever read. Glorious Misadventures is the perfect title because Nikolai Rezanov was so far ahead of his time in terms of his vision of what could be done with the "new world" and yet kept skittering off the mark. A perfect example of brilliant ideas coupled with arrogance, egomania, and short-sightedness making a perfect recipe for failure. That Russia twice sold land that provided the two biggest gold rushes of the 19th century pretty much says it all. I enjoyed this right to the last page of the epilogue.
    • 4/5
      An entirely serviceable, if workmanlike, account of Nikolai Rezanov's life and adventures in Russian America. The narrative gets a bit plodding at a few points, but generally moves along quite nicely and is filled with interesting historical tidbits about Russian settlements in North America, and about Rezanov's disastrous embassy to Japan. A useful example of "what might have been," had Rezanov been more successful with his schemes.