A 'story of those semi-barbarous times when Russia, sleeping the eternal, dream-haunted sleep of Asia, was awakened and torn asunder by the implacable ambition and modernism of Nikon, the celebrated patriarch, and the medieval conservatism of the wild mountaineers, the peasants, and the Cossacks. In the strife between Nikon's new Latin cross, and the old eight-pointed cross of the Othodox Church, all the hatred of religious conflict was loosed upon the land of Russia, and death and torture were unchained.' (Dust jacket blurb)
