Pharaoh Mernephta

Vera Ivanovna Kryzhanovskaya (married name Semenova; pseudonym Rochester; 1857-1924) was a Russian writer, author of sentimental women's novels, historical and occult works that were quite popular in the early 20th century. She was born in Warsaw, educated in St. Petersburg; in the 1880s-1890s she lived in Western Europe. She began writing at the age of 18; fluent in many foreign languages, she wrote her first works in French and published them in Paris. Following the tradition common among spiritualists, Kryzhanovskaya claimed that her novels were dictated to her by the spirit of the English poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who believed in the afterlife of the soul on earth (hence her pseudonym, which she put on her works next to her surname). She became widely known as a spiritual medium. After the revolution, she emigrated to Estonia, where she died from backbreaking physical labor while working in a sawmill. The novel "e;Pharaoh Mernephta,"e; published in this volume, is essentially the biblical story of the prophet Moses and the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, told by direct participants in those events - Moses' mother, his friend Pinehas, and the Pharaoh's bodyguard.