Leather-bound book "The Life of Count Speransky" by M.A.Korf

Contemporaries called him "the clerical Napoleon", and Napoleon, according to rumors, offered to exchange the son of a simple rural deacon for one of his kingdoms. The nugget Mikhail Speransky owes his meteoric career exclusively to self-education, a brilliant mind and amazing performance. In ten years, a mathematics teacher from the seminary became Alexander I's right-hand man, developing a general plan for the reconstruction of the state, which was to become a constitutional monarchy and rely on the principle of separation of powers, as well as grant civil and political rights to the population. These projects did not come to fruition immediately, but paved the way for the reforms of Alexander II, a pupil of Speransky. The nobles, who opposed the reforms, forced the emperor to send the adviser into exile. Returning to government activity, Speransky became Governor-General of Siberia, giving impetus to the rapid development of the vast region. Under Nicholas I, Mikhail Mikhailovich managed to accomplish his main feat — to lay the foundations of Russian legal science. He systematized and summarized all the disparate regulations, combining them into a single Set of laws of the Russian Empire. The work of Baron Korf, who was in the service of Speransky, and then headed the Imperial Public Library, covers all stages of the great reformer's life.