This book is a microhistory based on the life of Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch, an example of a “Mercurian,” a term the author borrows from Yuri Slezkine to describe “footloose” souls who wander through a more sedentary society bringing change in their wake (The Jewish Century [Princeton, 2004], 175). Slezkine identified Germans as a common source of Mercurians, given the upheavals and displacements of the lands of the Holy Roman and Austrian empires during the long series of wars of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. For Alexander Martin, Rosenstrauch was typical not only as a German geographically displaced by those processes, but internally uprooted by the Age of Revolution as so many of his generation were (born 1768).

The details of Rosenstrauch’s life are not typical—indeed, there are so many twists and turns in his biography that for the first time this reviewer hesitates to reveal details for fear of ruining a true page-turner of a reading experience by introducing spoilers. Yet, Rosenstrauch’s unexpected life story, from itinerate actor in German spa towns to rich merchant peddling luxury cosmetics to the ladies of Moscow to devout Lutheran pastor on the frontier steppes of Ukraine, Martin argues, represents an odyssey that is in some ways the same odyssey of his generation and of the European world in the Age of Revolution. They came of age ready to reject the Old Regime, but without rules or patterns to replace it. For Rosenstrauch personally, like many others, the French Revolution (and more distant echoes of the other revolutions) were felt simply as violence and he rejected it as such, yet he equally rejected the strictures and limitations of the world he was born into: in fact, his surname was his own invention and to this day his birth family is a mystery. He abandoned his Silesian burgher origins to become an actor and never looked back. Eventually, like much of the rest of his generation, with much Sturm und Drang, so to speak, he embraced a bourgeois capitalist respectability that allowed him to take on new identities and achieve status that was literally of his own invention, yet that brought him and future generations of his family security and possibilities previously unimaginable.

The backdrop of Rosenstrauch’s extraordinary journey may seem likewise surprising: imperial Russia, especially under Nicholas I, is not usually described as a land of opportunity. But for Germans fleeing poverty, war, religious intolerance, and a restrictive social system, imperial Russia actually did serve exactly this purpose, and the more so when Rosenstrauch first arrived, in 1804. Alexander I, like his predecessors, believed that incorporating Europeans into his service class and social elite would help to educate and refine the Russian literate classes and fill out the ranks of his undermanned bureaucracy. Thus French, German, and British immigrants even from lesser educated families could make a good living in Russia as tutors, actors, merchants, or if they had the requisite skills, an excellent living in government or military service or as artisans for the elite. Rosenstrauch joined this large influx of immigrants and never, to his death in 1835, properly learned Russian or assimilated particularly deeply into Russian social circles. In this multilingual milieu, he used Masonic connections to make the leap from acting to the merchantry. It was his shop on Kuznetskii most in Moscow during Napoleon’s occupation and the fire in 1812 that inspired Rosenstrauch’s memoir that brought him to modern historical attention.

By the time Nicholas I had succeeded his brother and conservatism and nationalism put an end to freemasonry as well as the religious ecumenism that had made Rosenstrauch comfortable when he first arrived in Russia, Rosenstrauch had already managed to formally become a Lutheran pastor, again through connections rather than qualifications. His son took over the family business and eventually earned the family hereditary status as honored citizens.

The Rosenstrauchs’ odyssey is matched by Martin’s odyssey as historian, piecing this story together from documentary fragments that are both shockingly small and shockingly many and far-flung. Rosenstrauch, it seems, was both everywhere and always enigmatic. Martin navigates these obstacles masterfully, resulting in a monograph that sheds light on post-Enlightenment worldviews and reception in both the Holy Roman and Russian empires, but is also a delightful read. Students will find it eminently accessible; the section titled “The Real Russia,” on German immigrant struggles to comprehend Russia beyond the capital cities is an ideal excerpt in those cases where the whole book cannot be assigned.