Imperial Legend: The Mysterious Disappearance of Tsar Alexander I

"By 1825, his popularity waning, the health of his wife becoming more fragile by the day, he decided to remove himself and a bare-bones court to Taganrog, a remote town near the Crimea. A few weeks after his arrival there, he suddenly fell ill and died on November 19, 1825." "Rumors have swarmed that the young and still vigorous tsar - he was only forty-eight - had staged his death to expiate the sin that refused to leave him, the sin of patricide. The Legend has it that his "reincarnation" took the form of a starets, the humble and holy men who in the nineteenth century wandered throughout Russia doing good works. In this work, Alexis Troubetzkoy "solves" one of the most intriguing royal mysteries of the past two centuries."--Jacket.