Book
To the Hermitage / Malcolm Bradbury.
Record details
- ISBN: 0330376624 (hc.)
- Physical Description: xi, 498 p.
- Publisher: London : Picador, c2000.
Content descriptions
| Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliography. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Diderot, Denis, 1713-1784 > Fiction. Diderot, Denis, 1713-1784 > Appreciation > Fiction. French > Russia > Fiction. Novelists > Fiction Biographical fiction Russia > History > 1689-1801 > Fiction. |
- Blackwell North Amer
In October 1993 our narrator, a novelist, is invited to go to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project. While in Stockholm he is joined by various other members of the project - an academic aptly named Verso, known as The Encyclopedia, and a lustful opera-singer. On the journey towards Russia more is revealed about Diderot: the son of a knife-maker in Langres who went to Paris and compiled the Encyclopedia, a book that changed the world. Moving between two dual narratives, one contemporary and one two hundred years earlier, we learn how Diderot could be seen as the godfather of both the modern novel and of the computer, and how there might be an extraordinary amount of missing material in St. Petersburg.
Bradbury recreates the climate of the eighteenth century and Diderot's journey to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of that powerful monarch, Catherine the Great, whose influence would change the path of history. And the Diderot Project itself becomes a quest to recapture Diderot's lost world, and, in so doing, illuminate ours.
