Johann Vogt-Wagner Fiction Novels Book | sku-363739033

Johann Vogt-Wagner's Fiction Novels title V Rossiju na svobodnye zemli (sku-363739033) is a new Russian-language trade paperback with glued binding, 594 pages and ISBN 9783738624663. The first book opens in the summer of 1765, when Count Vorontsov and Grigory Orlov meet in the park at Tsarskoye Selo after Catherine summons them to discuss resettlement policy.

They trade barbs over their families' standing, then work together at the empress's direction to prepare a resettlement campaign and revise a manifesto intended to attract European farmers to Russia. Vorontsov fears that colonization of the Volga region will fail to assimilate the settlers and harm them, the Russian population and steppe nomads.

The second book opens in the German colony where Adam Wagner died, more than a century later. An oak named Old Adam stands there in his memory. The Wagner family discusses changes affecting colonists: permanent exemption from conscription in 1824, mandatory military service in 1874 and its consequences for the family in the 1890s.

Wagner's youngest son, Johann, admires Heinrich Trerin, who is rumored to have returned from the army with socialist ideas that worry his father.