A very good person and a very bad person, a brisk pen, cheerful and scary

This book is dedicated to those aspects of the life of Peter I, about which it is customary to talk in passing as something not the most important, although without them, perhaps, there would be no very personality. In the focus of her attention to the fun king-reformer. The peculiar humor of Peter is reported in many memoirs; These evidence are reproduced in this edition mainly for the journal publications of the XIX century. But the most clearly tsarist wit was manifested in the instructions, registers, rites of the “crazy, alluring and all -like cathedral” - the Shutovsky Order, which united the closest associates and drinking companions of the king. Rough, if you look from the height of our time, it is quite consistent with the spirit of the era, which we now call the name of Peter. The king attached a hand to the composition of most documents of the cathedral, and wrote and edited them as carefully as the numbers of the “St. Petersburg Vedomosti” - the first Russian newspaper. It is no coincidence that the book includes an essay on Peter - writer and editor. And as a bonus - a brief essay about Peter's dreams recorded by him.