Explore "Peter and Alexis" by Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was announced to the people, precisely as it had been to foreign courts, that the Tsarevitch had died of apoplexy.
But the Russian people did not believe it. Some asserted he had died under his father's blows; others shook their heads dubiously, as much as to say, "the affair went off too quickly to be quite straightforward. " Others again maintained that the Tsarevitch had not died; that an officer of the Guards who resembled him had been buried in his stead, while he himself had fled from his father, away to the monasteries beyond the Volga, or else to the Cossacks in the steppes beyond the "free rivers," where he was in hiding.