Prince Peter Kropotkin (born in 1842) was best known as an anarchist philosopher, and many do not realize that in the early 20th-century he wrote and lectured in the United States on Russian literature. But Kropotkin, in his preface, complains that: ©It is by no means an easy task to speak or to write about the literature of a country, when this literature is hardly known to the audience or to the readers.©