Page:Julian Niemcewicz - Notes of my Captivity in Russia.djvu/9



original, of which this volume is a translation, was written, nearly fifty years ago. during the Author's residence in the United States of America, and left by him, before his death in 1841, to the Polish Historical Committee of Paris, by whose order it was first published last year.

Russia has been, for the last ten years, a favourite field of investigation. Many tourists, English, American, German, and French, have employed their pens in the description of that colossal Empire, and have enriched the literature of their respective countries with interesting and popular works. The intrinsic value, however, of these works varies according to the means their authors had of obtaining correct information regarding a country, in which truth, like many other things, is the exclusive monopoly of the Autocrat, and of whose language and customs foreign writers are comparatively ignorant.