“On my last visit to Moscow, a secondhand bookseller from Sukharev Tower delivered to me several old manuscripts for review, among which was also the one I now present to the readers. It was in an old cover, with blue paper-covered boards for the margins, and it had neither a signature nor a title; it also lacked many pages at the beginning and at the end. But even what has survived, in my view, is of considerable interest as an unembellished account of events that, at the time, interested some—apparently very respectable, original, and seriously minded public circle. Therefore, I offer, in the original, the notes of an unknown chronicler in the same order and under the same specific headings under which they were recorded in the half-destroyed manuscript…”