Daniel Defoe: Fact or Fiction

Alexander Livergant is a literary scholar, translator, and chief editor of the journal “Foreign Literature,” and a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is the author of biographies of R. Kipling, S. Maugham, O. Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, G. Miller, G. Greene, Virginia Woolf, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie. It’s hard to believe that the hero of his new book is just one person. Who he wasn’t! A would-be “shepherd of God” (he quit a theological academy) who became a preacher and the author of moralizing treatises. A courtier and patriot—yet also a rebel (he took part in a revolt against James II) and a free-thinker (he was tried, sentenced to the pillory, and imprisoned). A spy and a secret government agent—collecting information and investigating political sentiments in Scotland. An enterprising merchant (selling candles and meat, stockings and perfumes, wine, tobacco, and even cats)—and yet an eternal bankrupt, hiding from his creditors. A traveler and a mariner—how many adventures he went through: on land (cannibals, wild beasts) and at sea (storms, shipwrecks, pirates, mutinies aboard ship)… He was a biographer (lives from Peter the Great to criminal offenders), a historian (from “The History of the Wars of Charles XII” to “A General History of Trade”), a novelist (the author of five “bildungsromans”—adventurous, historical, picaresque) and a poet, journalist, and newspaper publisher… But for all of us, perhaps, he is—and for this we will be grateful to him forever—the author of “Robinson Crusoe.”