Searching For The Emperor - Hardcover

Pazzi, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394559983 ISBN 13: 9780394559988

Publisher: Knopf, 1988

Synopsis

While Tsar Nicholas and the rest of the Imperial family await almost certain death in captivity, the commander of the Tsar's regiment in a remote Siberian outpost begins a forced march to save the empire and his sovereign

About this title

Reviews

With rare empathy, Italian poet and novelist Pazzi ( The Illness of Time ) gets inside the mind of Tsar Nicholas II in the tense days when the Imperial family was kept under house arrest by Red guards, awaiting execution. Nicholas reminisces about an old mistress, swings between hope and fear, curses the Bolsheviks; he declares that Russia's strength lies in the fact that it escaped the Enlightenment. Hundreds of miles away, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, receiving news of the tsar's imprisonment, goads his ragtag regiment across frozen Siberian wastes to save their ruler. It's a futile quest punctuated by dreams and omensmigrating birds, a tiger huntthat symbolize the dying of Old Russia. This short, haunting novel, which marks Pazzi's American debut, is an elegant dirge, as crisply written as a moonlit night in the icy taiga. In portraying the distracted tsar, his overwrought wife, their embittered son Aleksei and their daughter Tatiana who communes with Rasputin's spirit, Pazzi poetically evokes a society on the brink of collapse.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The last days of the Romanovs abound in materials for both historian and fabulist, as Italian poet/novelist Pazzi's strange brew of fact and fantasy shows. His Tsar Nicholas frets about his limitations, imagining himself as a river, powerful but confined, helpless before new forces that demand the freedom of a sea. As Nicholas and his family languish in their Siberian prison, the autocratic and idiosyncratic commander of his personal regiment, Prince Ypsilanti, ventures forth with his troops to rescue the doomed sovereign. Rich in characterization, the two tales alternate, slowly closing upon each other until fusing at last in a grim, ironic passion of politics and death. Pazzi has the power to haunt our imagination, but what he intends for our understanding remains obscure. Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394559983
• ISBN 13: 9780394559988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 195