Audiobook · read by volunteers
Peter the Great
Jacob Abbott (1803–1879)
Read by Russ Lemker, Carmina Sansone, Lizzie Driver, Esther, hefyd, Anna Simon · 20 chapters · 7 h 02
About the book
A boy-tsar who grew up amid palace plots, then went abroad to learn shipbuilding with his own hands, returned to Russia and changed everything. Peter the Great dragged his enormous country towards the West, building a new capital on a marsh, creating a navy, reforming the army and the court, and crushing every challenge to his will. Jacob Abbott’s biography, written for young readers, tells the story clearly and with a flair for the dramatic episode. It begins with a preface and moves through the early years, the rivalry with his half-sister Sophia, the travels that took him to the shipyards of Holland and England, and the great struggles of his reign. Six LibriVox volunteers share the twenty chapters, which run for seven hours. An engaging introduction to one of the most powerful and controversial rulers in European history.
Introduction
Jacob Abbott was born in 1803 and died in 1879. He was an American writer and teacher who produced a very large number of books for young readers, including the Rollo books and a long series of historical biographies. His aim was to make history lively and readable for a general audience.
His Peter the Great belongs to that series. It first appeared in the nineteenth century, within Abbott’s lifetime, and was reprinted many times afterwards. Abbott writes in clear, direct prose, focusing on dramatic episodes and on the character of the tsar, and he does not hesitate to tell a story in order to make a point.
Peter I of Russia ruled in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and is remembered for his drive to modernise his country. He travelled in Western Europe, founded Saint Petersburg and reorganised the army and the state. Historians have since filled in many details that Abbott did not have, and they have often been more critical of the human cost of Peter’s reforms. Readers should take the book as a nineteenth-century introduction rather than a modern scholarly study.
The recording opens with a preface and includes a chapter on the Princess Sophia, who played a key role in Peter’s early life. It has twenty chapters and lasts about seven hours, shared among six LibriVox volunteers. It will be a pleasure for students of history, young and old, and for anyone who likes a well-told biography.
Public domain
Jacob Abbott died in 1879: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive