The novella by V. M. Glinka is based on material from Russian history in the first quarter of the 19th century. At the center of the novella is a simple soldier who, on December 14, 1825, was on Senate Square. The high literary merits of the novella, combined with the author’s deep scholarly knowledge—one of the best connoisseurs of Russian historical everyday life of the 18th–19th centuries—will be of interest to the modern reader, who is drawn to national history.
“History of Unter Ivanov” forms a single whole with the second novel by V. M. Glinka—“The Fate of a Palace Grenadier.”