“I created nothing, I composed nothing.” This is what Josef Roth writes in the introduction to his novel, to emphasize that he was an observer, a meticulous scrutinizer, a storyteller who understood early on that in this world he was an endless fugitive. Franz Tonda, an Austrian officer, succeeds in escaping from Russian captivity in World War I. Ahead of him is an adventure full of paradoxes, as the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War take him between several cities such as Moscow, Baku, Berlin, and Paris. Each city was a temporary stopover from which he prepared to leave—to escape endlessly, to depict the perishing Europe of that time from the perspective of someone lost in the world. “Roth does not protest the European conditions after the war; he merely states the facts.” - Siegfried Kracauer, German journalist and film critic. “Josef Roth did not only write a novel about the Soviet Union, but also about post-war Europe. "The author was skeptical of the emerging Soviet Union due to its deep-rooted oppression. This forced the freedom-loving Tonda to flee the country to the West." - Helmut Kessel, Professor of Modern German Literature, University of Heidelberg. "Roth presented literature in the novel as an approach not without gaps that were closely examined within the text in question." - Claudio Magris, Italian writer, translator, and specialist in German studies