About the Book
An erudite and entertaining history of Moscow, a city defined by its survival and reinvention, and whose rich history offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics
"A magisterial account of Moscow that reveals the city’s history and something of its soul through countless interwoven stories and colorful characters. . . . A gripping and enlightening journey.”
—Ben Rhodes, New York Times bestselling author of After the Fall
The city of Moscow stands at the center of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, 11 time zones, and nearly 150 million people, some 13 million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a “big village”—the demeaning nickname the St. Peterburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbor—into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import.
That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic—not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back further still, to the founding of the place we now know as Moscow as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of external forces—from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler—set their sights on Moscow, reinforcing its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defense and resurrection.
Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, from the birchbark scrawls that record the oldest layer of Russian civilization to the articles in European newspapers heralding the opening of the magnificent Bolshoi Theater, Morrison brings to life the bloody power struggles; cultural marvels; excruciating famines, droughts, storms, and fires that have shaped and reshaped the city and reinforced its essential character.
With A Kingdom and a Village, Morrison makes a persuasive, even impassioned case that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past but also, critically, to grasp the grim logic of its present. It is a magisterial biography of a place—and an essential guide to a people and a nation.
About the Author :
SIMON MORRISON is a professor of music and Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University. He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books and has written for Time, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds a PhD from Princeton University.
Review :
"The erudition of A Kingdom and a Village, Simon Morrison’s book on 1,000 years of Moscow’s history, is matched only by its readability."
—Financial Times
"At once scholarly and impressionistic. . . . A technicolour chronicle of the city."
—Economist
“A thousand years of one city, told as a story you cannot put down. . . . Morrison writes the way good historians rarely allow themselves. Clean sentences. Sharp scenes. No hiding behind abstraction.”
—WORLD
"Eminently readable. . . . Simon Morrison’s sweeping history traces the rise of one of the world’s great cities."
—Book and Film Globe
"Monumental, sweeping. . . . As much a history of Russia over the past millennium as a portrait of a city. . . . A book about the often distant past that [feels] cleverly ripped from today’s front pages. And very likely tomorrow’s too."
—The Times (UK)
"[A] sweeping, judicious, and elegant history of Moscow from the origins of the city to the present day. . . . Messy cities such as Moscow are where civilization resides—but where its destroyers usually make their homes as well. That is why urban history is also a race against time, a struggle to get down the past as people actually lived it before it is buried and paved over. . . . Morrison is brilliant in chronicling, rhapsodizing, and dissolving Moscow all at once."
—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“A Kingdom and a Village is a magisterial account of Moscow that reveals the city’s history and something of its soul through countless interwoven stories and colorful characters. This book is a gripping and enlightening journey filled with war and peace; tyrants and revolutionaries; famine, pestilence and plague; music, literature and theater; Christianity and Communism; death and rebirth. At a time when Russia is once again trying to remake the borders of Europe and the nature of politics in the world, Simon Morrison gives us a new way to understand this vast and ever-changing country through this singularly compelling capital city.”
—Ben Rhodes, New York Times bestselling author of After the Fall
“A gem of a book, exploring the people, the fables, and the history of Moscow, one of the great cities of the world. With vivid writing, and an astonishing body of research, Simon Morrison creates a mesmerizing tale of how Moscow came to be. Read it slowly, wander through the Russian capital with him, and you will understand when he says: ‘Moscow is hard to love, but I love it.’”
—Jill Dougherty, author of My Russia
"Simon Morrison’s riveting biography of Moscow is breathtaking in its span, covering architecture, music, Russian leaders’ decisions and the ordinary people’s response, society, institutions, and much more. It is also Morrison’s beautifully written story of his personal relations with the country that began in 1990 during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika, when he visited Moscow for the first time. It is a love story that has continued to this day."
—Nina Khrushcheva, co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps
“A preeminent historian of Russian history and culture, Simon Morrison is the perfect biographer of Moscow, one of the world’s most fascinating and enigmatic cities.”
—Shaun Walker, author of The Illegals
"Russia is more than just Moscow, but it has long been its beating heart—at once bloody and life-giving—and this book captures its progress from insignificant hamlet to modern megalopolis magnificently. Every page pulses with individuals' stories or historical insights, making this a wonderful biography of a city, its rulers and people."
—Mark Galeotti, author of A Short History of Russia
"A marvellous book. It takes huge imaginative vision and a deep on-the-ground knowledge of Moscow, acquired over many years, to grasp the full dynamism of the city’s history. But Simon Morrison has pulled it off. His ambitious, erudite account is vivid and compelling, a wonderful conjuring up of Russia’s great capital in all its beauty, fire and fury'
—Helen Rappaport, author of The Rebel Romanov
"A sprawling biography of place, which seeks to understand a nation through the life of its largest city, tracing Moscow’s evolution via dozens of historical upheavals, from war, famine, drought, and much, much more."
—LitHub
"A revealing portrait of a city that has made and been made by an always difficult history….A winning account."
—Kirkus
