Old life

A talented journalist and a life-being, a tireless traveler and a collector of facts, seriously interested, seemed to be all - with medicine and theater, mineralogy and perfumery, gardening and ... jumps, - Mikhail Dustyev was heard among the contemporaries of the walking encyclopedia. However, his genuine passion was Russian history, the history of noble childbirth, streets and estates, theater, music and culinary art, entertainment and gambling. Twelve books, each of which at one time became a real bestseller, strengthened the glory of the historian-collector historian of those little life, which usually elude academic science attention. The Old Life, first published in St. Petersburg in 1892, is one of them.
Fashion accessories of Frances and record coquette Times of Peter and Catherine, gastronomic and card madness of the favorites, the history of the elders and scientists - about this and many other things are fascinating and with a cute smile. As for the artistic value of Pylayevsky books, it is simply inevitable, because the editor of them, not indifferent and attentive, was a friend of the author, the Russian classic Nikolay Leskov