Michel Strogoff Reading Order

Michel Strogoff (1876) by Jules Verne is the most purely exciting of his adventure novels — a non-stop chase narrative in which Michel Strogoff, a courier of the Tsar, must cross Siberia from Moscow to Irkutsk to warn the Grand Duke of a Tartar invasion, pursued by the traitor Ivan Ogareff who knows his mission and is trying to stop him. The novel is a masterpiece of sustained tension: every chapter adds an obstacle, every solution creates a new problem, and Verne maintains the pressure for nearly 600 pages without losing momentum. What makes Michel Strogoff more than a straightforward adventure is its protagonist: Strogoff is defined by his loyalty to his mission and his refusal to let any personal consideration — including the apparent blinding that occurs in the middle of the novel — prevent him from completing it. The novel is also a geography lesson in Siberia and Central Asia at a time when that territory was almost completely unknown to Western readers, and Verne had researched it with his usual thoroughness. Michel Strogoff was dramatized almost immediately and the stage version was one of the most popular theatrical spectacles of the late nineteenth century; it has never stopped being popular in France and was filmed multiple times in the twentieth century.