The photographs presented in the book, made with the ambrotype process - resulting in one-of-a-kind images captured on glass - represent a new stage in photography, the so-called "antiquarian avant-garde," that is, the radical rediscovery of obsolete photographic techniques. Sergei Romanov goes further than any other contemporary photographer in pushing his medium into imagistic territory never approached before, because he has ignored all the rules: he just doesn't care about good taste, or perfect craftsmanship, or total control, or conceptual strategies. He is deeply convinced that what is most important (and most often missing in today's photography) is an ineffable spirit - and he will risk everything to evoke it. When he succeeds, his images possess the uncanny physical presence of the living body, the primal magnetism of sexuality, and the hypnotic involvement of an hallucination. A waking dream. Sergei Romanov (b. 1970) is one of Russia's preeminent photographers. Entirely self-taught, Romanov produces distinctive ambrotype images featuring hyper-stylized female nudes and other subjects. Highly expressive in their dark surrealism, these staged photographs nod to Sally Mann on the one hand and fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton, Sarah Moon, and Ellen von Unwerth on the other. Romanov's work is included in the permanent collections of the Musei Moskvy, Kunstmuseum Luzern, and the San Diego Museum of Art, as well as in a number of private collections, including that of Juan Antonio Pérez Simón.

Illustrated with contemporary photographs, this account of the Russian royal family form 1818 until the end of its reign and beyond will appeal to anyone interested in the dramatic and tragic story of the Romanov family, and in Russian history.

History and biography meet in Tales of Imperial Russia, a study of the late-Romanov Russian Empire, told through the figure of Sergei Witte. Like Bismarck or Gorbachev, Witte was a European statesman serving an empire. He was the most important statesman of pre-revolutionary Russia. In the Georgia, Odessa, Kyiv, and St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, he inhabited the worlds of the Victorian Age, as young boy, student, railway executive, lover of divorcees and Jews, monarchist, and technocrat. His political career saw him construct the Tran-Siberian Railway, propel Russia towards Far Eastern war with Japan, visit America in 1905 to negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth concluding that war, and return home to confront revolutionary disorder with the State Duma, the first Russian parliament. The book is based on two memoir manuscripts that Witte wrote between 1906 and 1912, and includes his account of Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, and the machinations of a Russian imperial court that he believed were leading the country to revolution. Telling the story both of a life and of the last days of the Tsarist empire, Tales of Imperial Russia will delight and inform all those interested in biography, literature, and history, as well as readers interested in the history of modern Russia.

Russian playwright and historian Radzinsky mines sources never before available to create a fascinating portrait of the monarch, and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days.

A “magnificent and intimate” (Harper’s) modern classic of Russian history, the spellbinding story of the love that ended an empire—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great “A moving, rich book . . . [This] revealing, densely documented account of the last Romanovs focuses not on the great events . . . but on the royal family and their evil nemesis. . . . The tale is so bizarre, no melodrama is equal to it.”—Newsweek In this commanding book, New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of the Russian empire to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.

History and biography meet in 'Tales of Imperial Russia', a study of the late-Romanov Russian Empire told through the figure of Sergei Witte. His political career saw him construct the Trans-Siberian Railway, propel Russia towards war with Japan and confront revolutionary disorder with the State Duma, the first Russian parliament.

This work examines Alexander II's life and reign, and the lives of his children, including his successor Tsar Alexander III, whose determination to purge the empire of all terrorism and protect the autocracy brought more violence in its wake. It also recounts the lives of the Tsar's children.