Michael Strogoff is the most thrilling novel Verne wrote, it is not science fiction, and its central event depends on a phenomenon any physicist can name.
The Leidenfrost effect. A liquid meeting a surface far hotter than its boiling point does not spread and evaporate. It forms an insulating vapor layer underneath itself and survives considerably longer than it should.
Verne builds the turn of his plot on that, and it is the best use he ever made of a scientific fact, because it is not an invention or a prediction. It is a thing that happens, deployed at the moment the reader needs to be told something is impossible.
Saying more would spoil Michael Strogoff. Read it knowing the physics is real and that it matters.
Fiction by René Rehn
What It Is
1876 · Michel Strogoff · Extraordinary Voyages number fourteen · illustrated by Jules Férat
Michael Strogoff is thirty, from Omsk, and a courier to Tsar Alexander II.
Feofar Khan has raised a Tartar revolt, Siberia is cut off, and a Russian traitor named Ivan Ogareff is working for the other side. Strogoff has to get from Moscow to Irkutsk to warn the governor, who is the Tsar’s brother, and he has to do it traveling under a false name.
He picks up company. Nadia Fedor, a young Russian woman going east to reach her father, who is an exile. And two journalists, Harry Blount of the Daily Telegraph and the Frenchman Alcide Jolivet, who spend the novel competing to file first and provide most of the comedy.
It is a pursuit novel. No submarine, no balloon, nothing invented, and it is the most purely exciting thing Verne wrote.
Turgenev Checked It
This is the fact that ought to be on the cover.
Verne had never been to Siberia. So in August 1875, before publication, Hetzel sent the manuscript to Ivan Turgenev to check whether the Russia in it was credible.
One of the great Russian novelists of the century, proofreading an adventure story by a Frenchman who had made the place up from books.
The geography came out accurate. The politics did not, and Verne almost certainly knew. By the 1870s Russia had already swallowed the khanates of Kokand and Bukhara, well south of Strogoff’s route, and a Tartar force meeting the Russian army as an equal was already a historical impossibility when he wrote it.
So the landscape is real and the war is a fantasy laid across it, which is a fair description of most adventure fiction and an unusually honest one here.
As for where he got the material, the story that the anarchist Peter Kropotkin briefed him does not survive the dates, since Kropotkin reached France after the book was out. The likelier source is Mikhail Sidorov, a businessman who showed Siberian oil samples and photographs at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873, where Verne may well have met him.
The Translation Is by a Woman Whose Name Is Not on It
The English text almost everybody reads was made by Agnes Kinloch Kingston in 1876, the same year as the French.
It was published under her husband’s name. W. H. G. Kingston was a well-known writer of boys’ adventure stories, and the Verne translations that carry his name were substantially his wife’s work.
Which means the standard English Michael Strogoff is a Victorian translation, done at speed, credited to the wrong person.
Who mangled him in English, and which translators to trust, is laid out on my Jules Verne books guide.
Why It Is Filed With the Science Fiction
There is nothing invented in this book. No submarine, no rocket, no hollow earth. A man rides across Siberia carrying a letter.
It sits in the Sci-Fi cluster anyway, with the rest of Verne, and that is deliberate.
Verne is one of the founding science fiction writers and he is filed by author here rather than by title, which keeps Twenty Thousand Leagues, From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Center of the Earth in one place with the books that have no science in them at all. Splitting the shelf by content would scatter him across three clusters and help nobody.
Worth saying plainly that the adventure novels are a large part of him and are not a lesser part. Michael Strogoff, Around the World in Eighty Days, In Search of the Castaways and Two Years’ Vacation are straight adventure, and Strogoff is the one Verne himself thought was his best.
Which Edition, and This Is the Weakest Position on Any Verne Page Here
There is no Butcher translation of this one, no Naval Institute restoration, and no modern scholarly edition that this site has been able to find.
On the evidence of every other Verne novel, a Victorian English text means the science was cut, the humor flattened and sometimes the names changed. That is an inference from the pattern rather than a finding about this book, and it is marked as one.
So the advice is a warning rather than a recommendation. Look for a named translator. Check whether the journalists are funny, because the comic subplot is the first thing a Victorian translator would trim. And if a modern translation has appeared since this was written, buy it without comparing prices.
Verne Adapted It Himself, and Then the World Would Not Stop
Almost nothing else in his catalog can say the first part.
In 1880 he and Adolphe d’Ennery turned it into a stage play, so the dramatic version is the author’s own rather than somebody else’s reading of him. Alexandre Artus wrote incidental music for it that year and Franz von Suppé wrote more in 1893. A Spanish zarzuela had got there first, in Madrid in 1879.
Then the films, and there are a lot of them.
Silents in 1910 for Edison and 1914, the second lost when its negatives burned in the Lubin vault fire. Victor Tourjansky’s 1926 French-German version, which has a real reputation. Two separate 1936 productions. An American one in 1937 released as The Soldier and the Lady. A Mexican one in 1944. Carmine Gallone’s 1956 co-production. Tourjansky again in 1961. A 1970 version, a seven-part television drama in 1975.
And it did not stop there, which is the part that surprised me. A twenty-six-episode animated series in 1998. A television film in 1999. A French series in 2004. An Italian episode in 2013. A board game in 2017.
For a novel nobody in the English-speaking world talks about, that is a remarkably busy afterlife, and almost all of it is continental.
What People Have Said About It
A critic called Leonard S. Davidow put it about as strongly as it can be put: Verne wrote no better book than this, and it deservedly ranks among the most thrilling tales ever written.
That is a large claim and it is not an eccentric one. This novel has a reputation among Verne’s own readers that the famous titles do not, and the reason is that the suspense is built rather than announced.
Where to Go Next
His other novel with no invention in it, and a translation actually worth buying, is covered on my Around the World in 80 Days page, and the French novels list sets him against the rest of the French shelf.
