The well-known scientist-historian Kazimir Valishevsky chose for his literary debut an extensive and fertile theme - the Time of Troubles in Russia. The period that is still close to the heart of every Pole, the time when the Polish gentry freely settled in the Moscow Kremlin and was not enough to declare the Rzeczpospolita empire "from sea to sea" ... But it did not grow together. The smallest thing was not enough.

The Russians had their own ideas about Christian values, the legitimate Tsar, and so on. So the works of Valishevsky remained memories of the unfulfilled, although they survived several dozen reprints and won the recognition of readers. Despite the fact that some of the author's assessments and conclusions may seem controversial today, his trilogy about the time of Troubles remains unsurpassed to this day in terms of the amount of little-known factual material and the psychological reliability of the portraits of the characters.