Imagine time-traveling with a smart gentleman who is energetic, enthusiastic, sociable, and just happened to have lived there 'then.' This is the seamless, appropriately elaborate, and richly detailed adventure one experiences in reading this book. Troyat called this book a mere "sentimental promenade,' but he was much too modest. Biographer of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Elizabeth I and others, he had a pre-Revolutionary Russian early childhood, and the recollections of his (refugees-to-France) family members. In this book he enthusiastically and carefully recreates the sights, sounds, smells of daily life. The peasantry, workers and their everpresent sufferings and struggles, commerce, law, food, the gentry, the tsar and his retinue, social life, the hapless serfs, plus plans, hopes, and dreams. The chapter "Moscow's Many Faces" is reminiscence, and very informative. The research is the backbone of this work, which is greatly enriched and informed by Troyat's emotional ties to -- and sensory recall of -- the time and place.

An impressive volume in terms of the depth and scope. A "must have" for anybody interested in the subject, and based upon the surge of books on Hellenistic philosophy in the last decade there will be a good number of people among those "must haves." Even though it is primarily a reference book, many will want to read it from cover to cover. One disappointment, however: the editors seem to disply the usual academic prejudices against the more "wayward" Hellenistic thinkers, such as those who gave serious consideration to astrology and magic. One would expect a fuller accounting of Hellenistic astronomy, at least, if the astrology is too much for them. The volume is also surprisingly neglectful (a mere five pages) toward mathematics and its relationship to the amply treated subjects of Logic, Ethics, and Physics.