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The Marquis de Custine and HIS RUSSIA IN 1839.
The Marquis de Custine and HIS RUSSIA IN 1839 Author:George F. Kennan 'Even if we admit that La Russie en 1839 was not a very good book about Russia in 1839, we are confronted with the disturbing fact that it was an excellent book...about the Russia of Joseph Stalin, and not a bad book about the Russia of Brezhnev and Kosygin.' — It is this paradox which made Custine and his book a suitable subject for the Chichele... more » lectures which the eminent American diplomat and historian, George Kennan, gave at Oxford in 1969 and upon which the present work is based.
Astolphe Louis Léonor, Marquis de Custine, left his native Paris in the summer of 1839 and journeyed to Russia to substantiate his belief in Government by aristocracy and to seek arguments against representative government. He returned, in his own words, 'the Partisan of Constitutions," and wrote that 'whoever has well examined that country will be content to live anywhere else.'« less