About the book: 2006 / The book is dedicated to V. A. Zhukovsky (1783–1852) as an interpreter of modern Russian and European history. Turning to the distant past as a “cipher” of modernity and a prototype of the future is one of the main ideas of German romanticism, adopted by the Russian poet and applied to the interpretation of modern historical material and the affirmation of his own mission. Of particular interest are the poet’s works that depict the modern historical process in a metaphorical form that required intuition from the reader: “medieval” and “ancient” ballads, idylls, classical epics. The author examines the very strategy and mechanism of Zhukovsky’s transformation of modern historical material into a poetic image-idea - a process directly related to the problem of the poet’s romantic worldview. The book covers a period of more than a third of a century - from the establishment of "eternal peace" in Europe by Emperor Alexander to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Emperor Nicholas - in other words, the era of triumph and decline of the Holy Alliance.