Michael Strogoff is a historical adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, part of his Voyages Extraordinaires series, reproduced here from its Standard Ebooks edition.
Jules Verne is perhaps best known for his science fiction stories, and Michael Strogoff breaks that mold. It's a true-to-life tale of the titular character's journey across Siberia to deliver an important message to the brother of the Russian Czar.
Like other of Verne's works, Strogoff encounters many colorful characters along the way, and together they create a vivid depiction of the harsh life in Russo-Siberia, as well as the resilient spirit of its inhabitants. The attention to detail and the accuracy of both the physical and geographical depictions of Siberia was noted by contemporaries, though it's also said that Verne took some dramatic license in recreating some of the historical events.
Contemporary critics agreed that Michael Strogoff is a thrilling tale of the strength of men, of patriotism, and of the devotion of one human being to another. Modern critics consider it to be one of Verne's best novels.
Though W. H. K. Kingston was named as the translator when this edition was published, in fact it was Kingston's wife, Agnes Kinloch Kingston, who executed this translation. This fact was mentioned in her public obituary, but was forgotten until it was rediscovered by modern research.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
