Walpole’s sequel to his earlier book about Russian life,
The Dark Forest. John Durward, the English protagonist from that book and a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Walpole, is visiting St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) when he runs in to some old friends from England. Through them he meets Vera and Nina, two young and bourgeois sisters, and Nicolai Markovitch, a downtrodden and ridiculous inventor. Semyonov, a brooding doctor who is the sisters’ uncle and a character from
The Dark Forest, returns as a dark, viperous thread weaving through the..." data-title="Книга The Secret City">