The book describes the life and reign of Russian Tsar Nicholas I Romanov (who reigned from 1825 to 1855), who was also the crowned King of Poland and the brutal suppressor of the November Uprising.
The book was published just two years after the death of Tsar Nicholas I (who died in 1855 during the Crimean War, which Russia lost). Its publication in Kraków—that is, within what was then the Austrian partition (Galicia)—afforded the author somewhat greater freedom from censorship than would have been the case had it been published within the Kingdom of Poland, which was under the direct yoke of St. Petersburg. This made it possible to take stock of the era of one of the most authoritarian rulers of nineteenth-century Europe from the perspective of Polish subjects.
Antoni Tessarczyk (c. 1799–1869), a Kraków-based journalist, writer, and author of historical studies (he wrote, among other works, the monograph *The Kraków Republic*).
32 pages, paperback.
