Tsarevich Dimitri

20 hrs. 46 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Alexander Galkin

Narrator Lyudmila Pankratova

Description

The historical novel “The Tsarevich Dmitry”—this is the first part of Alexander Galkin’s trilogy “The Time of Troubles”—about the hardest “Troubles” period in Russian history (late 16th century, early 17th century, the establishment of the Romanov dynasty).

Its main hero is the Impostor, False Dmitry I, who came to the Russian throne with the help of Polish and Cossack forces. False Dmitry believed he truly was the tsarevich, the son of Ivan the Terrible—saved from the assassins sent by Boris Godunov. Receiving a European education, he sought to direct his royal efforts for the good of Rus’, but he failed to overcome the contradictions among different layers of the population. The boyars, the Cossacks, common people, the Polish шляхта—everyone wanted something different. And besides, he was humane and tried to rule without violence. As a result, he was killed by the boyars headed by Vasily Shuysky in the Kremlin courtyard. The secret of his origins remains undisclosed to this day. The book was written using archival materials.

A. V. Galkin (1877–1936) didn’t manage to fully carry out his plan (the trilogy): he was repressed, and the manuscripts of the second and third parts were destroyed, along with all his documents, drawings, and sculptures. Only the first part—“The Tsarevich Dmitry”—survived. This book was published by the State Publishing House for Literature (Goslitizdat) in 1936; after the author’s arrest, it was withdrawn from all libraries and bookstores. The remaining copies were burned in the courtyard of the Lubyanka prison. The only surviving copy of the novel is kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, donated by the author’s eldest daughter, Z. A. Troyanovskaya, after the writer’s rehabilitation in 1959. A magazine version of the novel was published in “Romān-gazeta” in 2004 and was recognized as the best novel of the year.