Valentin Pikulʹ

Valentin Savvich Pikul (Russian: Валенти́н Са́ввич Пи́куль) was a popular and prolific Russian/Soviet historical novelist. He lived and worked in Riga. Pikul's novels were grounded in extensive research, blending historical and fictional characters and often focusing on Russian nationalistic themes. Pikul's best-selling 1978 novel *At the Last Frontier* was a dramatized telling of Rasputin's influence over the Russian imperial court. Richard Stites says he was "a name hardly known to literary scholars but the most widely read author in the …