A British naval officer is arrested in Russia on a fabricated charge and buried in a fortress on a Baltic island, and the woman who loves him goes to get him out — with a yacht, a bank account and no legal standing whatever. Barr was a Scottish-born Canadian schoolmaster who talked his way into Detroit journalism, moved to London and founded The Idler with Jerome K. Jerome. The Russia here is Tsarist and unforgiving. Sixty plates of Russian and Baltic painting, from Shishkin and Vereshchagin to Napoleon before Moscow, give the fortress and the sea their true faces.
