In her extraordinary series of Francis Lymond novels, Dorothy Dunnett portrayed a man capable of taking full advantage of the glories of western Europe in one of its most vigorous and self-confident periods. To follow that series, she then began on the House of Niccolo, of which Niccolo Rising is the first, and set it some century prior to the time of Lymond as a means of exploring how that vigorous Europe came about and who were the men (and women) who shaped it.
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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is one of a number of Soviet era Russian (in fact Ukrainian) authors unable either to settle into the post-revolutionary lifestyle or to have his fiction published. In fact he died, in 1950, forty years before the stories in this collection were published and these were the first to be made available to the public. It is not, of course, very surprising in retrospect to consider that the individualist Krzhizhanovsky, unable to blend in to society as a whole, would constantly find his work rejected by the official censors and the editors who acted as their gatekeepers.
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