A taste for freedom : the life of Astolphe de Custine / Anka Muhlstein ; translated by Teresa Waugh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Muhlstein, Anka.

Standardized Title:

Astolphe de Custine, 1790-1857. English. 1999

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Custine, Astolphe, marquis de, 1790-1857.

Custine, Astolphe.

Authors, French--19th century--Biography.

Authors, French.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xx, 391 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 19 cm

Other Title:

Life of Astolphe de Custine

Place of Publication:

New York : Helen Marx Books, 1999.

Summary:

As a four-year-old boy, Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857) saw his mother taken from him and thrown into prison during the turbulent years following the French Revolution. As a grown man, he became passionately devoted to personal liberty and, as a homosexual, was the first member of French high society to live an openly conjugal life with another man. A talented writer, he traveled to Czarist Russia and returned to France to author a devastating account of despotism and the moral perversion of violent regimes. More than a century later, George Kennan praised Custine's book, Russia in 1838, as the best book available on Russia because it so perfectly explained the roots and consequences of a country's dependence on autocratic power. In this wonderfully readable new biography -- already published to high acclaim in France -- Anka Muhlstein stages a dramatic and fascinating account of the life of Astolphe de Custine, the child, the man, and the writer, set against the rich backdrops of revolutionary France and Czarist Russia.

Notes:

Originally published: Paris : Grasset & Fasquelle, 1996.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1885983417

OCLC:

42962935