Michael Strogoff

The tsar's courier carries a message to Irkutsk through a Tartar rising, with a false brother on the road, a journalist on each flank, and the certainty that if he is recognised he will not arrive. Verne's publisher Hetzel had the manuscript read by Turgenev, so that nothing in it would give offence in St Petersburg. The scene of the sabre and the eyes is among the cruellest things in nineteenth-c...