7.8 /10 1 Votes7.8
3.8/5 Barnes & Noble Publication date July 1991 Originally published July 1991 Genre Historical Fiction Publisher Hutchinson | 4/5 Goodreads Language English OCLC 21293710 ISBN 978-0-7126-2466-4 Country United Kingdom | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Pages 704 pp (first edition, hardback) Similar Edward Rutherfurd books, Historical Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Russka is a historical novel by Edward Rutherfurd, published in 1991 by Crown Publishers. It quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
Contents
Plot summary
The narrative spans 1,800 years of Russian history. The families that provide the focus for the story are the Bobrovs, Romanovs, Karpenkos, Suvorins and Popovs. The five families span the main ethnic groups and social levels of the society in this northern empire.
Historical characters encountered through the narrative include Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible and his secret police, the westernizing Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and the Bolsheviks of the twentieth century.
The stories of different characters in those families use actual stories of different Russian families. For example, the peasant family that joins the nobility, because of its business, is based on the Stroganovs. The nobleman who is a friend of Ivan IV of Russia and asks his territory to be part of the Oprichnina is also based on a member of the Stroganovs but at a different period.