An ambitious and compelling novel, The Watch tells the story of Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, a former prince who renounced his riches to become an anarchist, and his deathbed pact with the mysterious visitor who gives Peter a new life in the future -- a seeming miracle with a darker edge that soon comes into focus.

I was suddenly struck by an extraordinary spectacle; on the dark vault of the sky I saw an immense meteor with a long tail and dazzling green light which lit up the sky and the earth. It fell slowly and disappeared on the horizon. I had never seen anything like it in my life. We stood as if fixed to the spot. It seemed to us that there was a mysterious relationship between the falling star and the dying revolutionary.

-- Boris Lebedev, Kropotkin's son-in-law, in his account of Kropotkin's death February 8, 1921

[In prison] I asked, of course, to have paper, pen, and ink, but was absolutely refused.... I suffered very much from this forced inactivity, and began to compose in my imagination a series of novels for popular reading.... I made up the plot, the descriptions, the dialogues, and tried to commit the whole to memory from the beginning to the end.

-- Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

Since my death, I've thought a good deal of my childhood in Russia, when I was "Prince" Peter Kropotkin, a title I renounced at twelve. These recollections serve to remind me that I have always been -- from my earliest memories to this moment (some hours into my new life) -- very much the same. It's remarkable when I think on it: seventy-eight years, and the same earnest fellow all along. It makes me wonder if I'll change this time round, or whether I'll keep working for my heart's desire -- that the world should change instead.

My mother died when I was not yet four. I must confess, being so young, I did not really know her. I have of her a mere handful of memories -- each one too grand and charged with emotions to be entirely trusted even if I could manage to disentangle reality from legend. But there was nothing illusory about the effect of my mother's memory on those servants entrusted with raising my brother and me. Even if they had not repeated it on every occasion, I would have known from the care and concern lavished on her sons that they thought my mother a fine woman indeed. Their kindness to me can never be exaggerated, nor their wisdom rivaled by later, more sophisticated teachers. As for inherited traits, I attribute to my mother whatever characteristics I possess of a worthwhile nature.

My father incarnated the man I did not wish to be. With such a father's shadow over me, I could never subscribe to any form of genetic determinism. As for his living presence -- the parent's guiding and shaping hand -- he little influenced my elder brother Sasha and me, for he largely ignored us.

He was a gentleman soldier, an officer naturally, like most of the lesser nobles of his generation who could imagine no greater contribution to the world than fine uniforms and close-order drills, a ballet without music or joy. He was as stingy as my mother was open-hearted; as dull as she was lively; as vindictive as she was loving. He was rich, however, master of twelve hundred serfs, human beings he presumed to own, tending to land he presumed to own. There was no end to his ownership and presumption.

I remember one night at dinner -- I was eight or so -- he told Sasha and me that he had been awarded a medal for gallantry because Frol, his man, had rushed into a burning house at great risk to himself and rescued a doomed child. My father's commander, witnessing these events, gave my father the Cross of St. Anne straightaway.

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