SIBERIAN EXILE, IMPERIAL PARDON
KOTZEBUE, August Friedrich Ferdinand von.
The most remarkable Year in the Life of Augustus von Kotzebue; containing an Account of his Exile into Siberia, and of the other extraordinary Events which happened to him in Russia. Written by himself. Translated from the German, by the Rev. Benjamin Beresford …
London, Richard Phillips, 1802.
Three vols, 8vo, pp. I: 278; II: 271, [1]; III: 226, with an engraved frontispiece portrait in vol. I and two further engraved plates; a fine copy, bound without the terminal advertisements in vol. III in contemporary half-calf and pink paste-paper boards; Downshire monogram to spines.
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The most remarkable Year in the Life of Augustus von Kotzebue; containing an Account of his Exile into Siberia, and of the other extraordinary Events which happened to him in Russia. Written by himself. Translated from the German, by the Rev. Benjamin Beresford …
First edition in English of Kotzebue’s Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens (1801), an account of his surprise arrest at the Russian border in 1800 on suspicions of being a Jacobin, and his transport to Tobolsk in Siberia. With some royal flattery, Kotzebue won his freedom back from Paul I, and was made a court councillor and appointed director of the German Theatre in St Petersburg.
Volume III contains a lengthy description of the Michailovsky Palace, written at Paul’s request. After the Emperor’s assassination in 1801, Kotzebue returned to Germany, where he was himself assassinated (by a liberal nationalist Burschenschafter) in 1819.
