The Prince and the Pauper. Yankees from Connecticut at the court of King Arthur

The second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the century of the twentieth - the time of a deep crisis and rethinking of political ideas around the world. The monarchical form of government, deeply rooted in the Old World, was severely criticized by various layers of society, especially from the creative intelligentsia. To a large extent, this was facilitated by the emergence of a new world, the development of the state, which is based on its free from past prejudice - the United States of America.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens, 1835-1910), according to William Faulkner-"The First Truly American Writer", also joined the world discussion and published two novels on the historical theme in which he outlined their views on existing and existing forms of government, on their advantages and disadvantages. In the novel "Prince and the Beggar" (1881), Twain describes the absurdity of the English state and judicial system of the sixteenth century, and in the novel, “Yankees from Connecticut at the court of King Arthur” (1889), he brutally criticizes the ideas of the monarchy, slaveholders, the nobility, and also ridicules Knight"s novels about the Middle Ages, idealizing an imperfect and unjust life way. However, the writer managed to find the bright sides of the outgoing times - after all, the rapidly advancing industrial era brings cynicism, selfishness, money -grubbing, excessive practicality to our lives and kills romance in the bud ...
Both novels were enthusiastically accepted by readers and very wary - representatives of European political elites. It is noteworthy that other works of Mark Twain almost immediately after the first domestic publication were translated into foreign languages, but this did not happen with both historical novels. So, the first Russian translation of the “Prince and the Beggar” appeared only fifteen years after the creation of the novel, and the first Russian translation “Yankees from Connecticut ...” - seven later (both in 1896).
Translations included in our book (V. A. Clement and Z. N. Zhuravskaya) were first published in 1911 and 1913 in the popular series "Library of the magazine" Satyricon "", released by the St. Petersburg Mikhail Germanovich Cornfeld (1884-1978), and the illustrations used for design saw the light much earlier - even in the very first foreign publications of these books. The work of the artists Ludwig Sando Ipsen (1840-1920), Frank Teyer Merrill (1848-1923), John J. Harley (? -1923) and Daniel Carter Birda (1850-1941) was well known and appreciated by Mark Twain himself.
The book includes two novels on the historical theme of the American writer Mark Twain (1835-1910) - "Prince and the Beggar" (translation by V. A. Clement) and "Yankees from Connecticut at the court of King Arthur" (Translation of Z. N . Zhuravskaya) For design, illustrations were used from the very first foreign publications of these books