Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary: The Idea of the Great Man in the Works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky, and Evgenii Tarle, by Gary Rosenshield, provides a masterly presentation of one of the most frequently recurring tropes of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature: the figure, character, achievements, and significance of Napoleon--the 'great man' of history. In an Introduction, seven chapters, and a summative Afterword, Professor Rosenshield describes the portraits of Napoleon offered by Alexander Pushkin (two chapters), Leo Tolstoy (another two), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and the Soviet era historian Eugene Tarle (one each). This book offers extensive detail on the contrasting views of these authors on the figure of Napoleon: Pushkin's ambivalence; Tolstoy's dismissiveness; Dostoevsky's alarm and hostility; Merezhkovsky's initial great hopes for such as Napoleon, and his ultimate disillusion; and Tarle's politically driven shifts in the portrait offered in the several versions of his biography of Napoleon. But Rosenshield offers much more than a series of separate portraits. The five years of research that produced this book has led also to the discovery of a factor that unites the disparate opinions of the various writers. Each of them is shown to have been dealing not only with Napoleon but also with devising or clarifying a conception of history and historical development in which their understanding of Napoleon and the 'great man' can be understood. As such, the book offers a significant contribution also to the understanding of the other works of these writers and of the political and historical contexts in which they lived.