Crown and the Crucible (The Russians Book #1)

Michael Phillips, Judith Pella

Description

Amid the turbulence of prerevolutionary Russia, the lives of two families become inextricably entwined. When Anna Burenin leaves her tiny village to work in St. Petersburg, she is thrust into the life of the spoiled Princess Katrina Fedorcenko. Soon both peasant and princess will face the prospect of their beloved Russia being torn apart.

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 13 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441229748
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 1991 by Michael Phillips and Judith Pella
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-2974-8
The Russian fable in chapter 2 is based on a folktale retold in the book The Snow Child by Freya Littledale. Published by Scholastic, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of historical personages, all characters are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to living persons, past or present, is coincidental.
Cover design by Melinda Schumacher—StudioCat Design
Judith Pella is represented by The Steve Laube Agency
Dedication
To Alaina Allender One of God’s young women, whose heart, like Anna’s of this story, hungers after purity and righteousness.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
A Cast of Characters
Prologue: Beginnings of Empire
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part I: A Father’s Heart
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Part II: Destiny of a New Life
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Part III: Near the Crown
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Part IV: Seeds of Conflict
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
Part V: Into the Crucible
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
About the Authors
Fiction by Michael Phillips
Books by Judith Pella
A Cast of Characters
The Burenin Family:
Yevno Pavlovich Burenin
Sophia Ilyanovna Burenin
Anna Yevnovna Burenin (Annushka)
Paul Yevnovich Burenin (Pavushka)
Tanya
Vera
Ilya
The Fedorcenko Family:
Prince Viktor Makhailovich Fedorcenko
Princess Natalia Vasilyovna Fedorcenko
Prince Sergei Viktorovich Fedorcenko
Princess Katrina Viktorovna Fedorcenko (Katitchka)
Count Dmitri Gregorovich Remizov—Sergei’s best friend
Lt. Mikhail Igorovich Grigorov—Cossack guard
Count Cyril Vlasenko—Local Chief of Police
Dr. Pyotr Anickin—Fedorcenko family physician
Basil Pyotrovich Anickin—doctor’s revolutionary son
Fedorcenko Servants:
Sarah Remington
Polya
Leo Vasilievich Moskalev
Olga Stephanovna
Nina Chomsky
Fedorcenko Acquaintances:
Alex Baklanov
Uspenskij’s
Princess Marya Nicolaievna Gudosnikov
Durnovo’s
Elizabeth Cerni
The custom in Russia is to be known by three names—the Christian name, the patronym (“son of . . .” or “daughter of . . .” your father’s name), and the surname. The patronym is formed by adding the appropriate suffix to the individual’s father’s Christian name. The endings are usually vich or ovich for a male, and vna or ovna for a female. These patronyms are often used almost interchangeably with the surname. Nicknames or “little” (diminutive) names are also used in intimate conversation between family and close friends—Pavushka, Annushka, Katitchka, Misha, Sasha, etc.
Prologue: Beginnings of Empire

Anna and Katrina’s story begins on Part I, chapter 1. But for those of you who love history as we do and who have become fascinated with the land of Russia and its people, we invite you to read the Prologue. It will introduce the historical roots of our story with some fictional characters and symbolic events as well as expand the historical framework with the sections in italics. Though the Prologue is not essential to understanding the story, some readers may wish to begin with chapter 1 and come back to the Prologue later.
1
368 AD
The solitary figure of a man receded into the distance.
He made his way slowly, but with purposeful step and determined gaze fixed on the unknown path before him. The warm southern plains had been good to his people. But more and more invaders—Orientals from the east, Huns and Celts from the European west—were now intruding into the land between the Dnieper and Don. And this was not a man who desired to fight other men. He would not take a life to retain even something he considered his own. He would rather battle the elements, and the earth itself. He had no stomach to contest against humankind.
Thus he had begun his sojourn away from that temperate region of the south. Behind him he left the conflicting mix of peoples already beginning to crowd in upon one another. He was of that breed that needed room and space.
He would take his Slavic bloodline to the north. There he would find a wife. There he would raise a family. There he would make his home, in a region where the snows were fierce and the earth hard. But at least he would not have to contend against others of his species. Something stirred within the heart of the lonely traveler, telling him that to do so was wrong.
As he walked, there was no smile on his rugged-featured face. His was an arduous life, the life of a nomad in search of a place to lay his head. In his veins flowed the blood of a people hardened and made somber by the ceaseless toil by which they wearily attempted to sustain themselves, a people only just learning to fashion implements and tools and weapons from what the earth begrudgingly gave them, a people calloused by the struggle just to stay alive with only their hands and what ingenuity they possessed to assist them. Hard work was the commodity of necessity, happiness a luxury reserved for scant moments around a fire at night, with a stomach full of roasted rabbit or wild sage-hen.
Onward he trudged. He could not hear them, but in time would be heard, somewhere in the regions of space above this land he traversed, the faint lonely tones, dark and somber, of a choir singing in minor key. They would be the sounds of the descendants, and would gradually during the coming centuries fill this land over which their progenitor now trekked. The voices of a hundred generations to follow would sing as a steadily rising tide as the people of this huge and awesome land. Now empty and silent, these voices would one day rise and ultimately step forward as one of the great peoples in one of the most powerful nations the world has ever known.
But for now, these voices remain silent, for the ears of future to hear.
And still the man plods on, ever northward, toward his destiny as one of the first of the great conflux of men and peoples and races which will one day be known as “the Russians.”
2
400–800 AD
By its very immensity, the land itself defies comprehension.
Russia . . . the Motherland . . . a land mass nearly the equal of most entire continents, containing a diversity of races, tongues, and ethnic heritages unparalleled in any nation on earth.
Who are the people we call “Russians?”
Whence spring their roots? What fuels their passions? Where do they derive their strength? Why have we of the West and they of the great land where East and West mingle so thoroughly eyed one another for generations with misunderstanding . . . even suspicion?
As their land is huge, their history is long. And from out of that history emerge the beginnings of answers to such questions that we—on both sides of the borders long separating East from West—of the late 20th century now find ourselves asking. It is a history kaleidoscopic in its scope , its changeableness, its contrasts, but with ever and again hues and shades of darkness permeating the colorful display of its peoples marching and toiling across the pages of time. It is a historic opera sung in minor key, whose cast of characters reflect looks of weary labor, yet where now and then a radiant smile suddenly brightens and energizes the entire stage.
All stories begin with people and places. So too does the chronicle of the people known as Russians. The people were a great variety of Slavic tribes and clans migrating northward out of the ashes of the fallen Roman empire. The place of this history was the steppes , plains, and especially the northern forests between the Black and the Baltic Seas—that no-man’s-land in continental theory where Europe gradually gives way to Asia. In the centuries after Rome’s collapse, the Slavs came northward and eastward from the Carpathians and gradually peopled and subdued this great land, and made it their home.
The diversity of the land presented these early Slavic tribes with very different challenges in the livelihood of survival. In the south, they traipsed across vast plains, or steppes, where the earth was fertile but where not a tree was visible for miles. In the north they encountered forests so thick and unending that the soil, if it could be found at all, could scarcely hope to produce crops for lack of sunlight.
The Slavs therefore became both farmers and foresters, wielding the iron implements of necessity—the plough in the south, the ax in the north—subjugating both steppe and timberland, and sustaining life with what the land gave them in return.
In the south, though the land was tame, its surrounding inhabitants were not. Not only were the fertile regions of what would later be known as the Ukraine enviably tempting, so too did the flat steppes north of the Black Sea offer the most accessible route of travel, commerce, and conquest between East and West. Thus the Slavs had to compete for the land with Huns and Avars, Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Celts, and later the Mongol Horde from China and Mongolia. The lack of natural barriers exposed them to threats of invasion wherever they turned, imbedding into the consciousness of these pre-Russian peoples a wary and apprehensive eye toward their neighbors