Abstract

About two months after the death of Alexander III the first posthumous biography of the Russian emperor was published, first in New York and then in London. Its author was the British journalist Charles Lowe. He did not know the Russian language and was not deeply informed about Russian domestic and foreign policy. This raises the question of the sources used by Lowе. Finding an answer to this question is complicated by the fact that this biography was not an academic study, but a historical and journalistic essay about the recently deceased monarch, so it was extremely incomplete in citing its sources. Hence, the analysis of the range of the biographer’s sources makes it possible to answer the question of which and whose perceptions infl uenced the formation of the commemoration practices of the era and the image of Alexander III in European public opinion. The sources of Lowe’s book are classified in the article into four groups: monographic studies, articles from periodicals, newspaper material, and quotations, which are subdivided into statements made without reference to sources and fragments of official documents (either public or not). After this initial classification, the author examines the distribution of sources according to the specific issues of Lowe’s interest to the biography and personality of Alexander III. Since such issues vary in their impact on the Lowe’s paradigm of commemoration, it is possible to trace the correlation between the tendentiousness of any source and the extent to which it is engaged by the biographer. The author concludes that Alexander III’s biography by Lowe was most infl uenced by the observations and judgements of the Irish writer and journalist Emile Dillon, who wrote about Russia under the pseudonym E.B. Lanin.