Crossing Out The Emperor
Crossing Out The Emperor is Michael's only novel so far, and grew out of excess research materials for his play about Beethoven Panharmonicon .
The novel depicts Napoleon's occupation of Moscow 1812, and the inner turmoil of Napoleon's lonely retreat from Russia later that year. Beethoven's life is observed through the analysis of two letters he wrote, The Heiligenstadt Testament , about going deaf aged twenty six, and The Letter To The Immortal Beloved , which he wrote to a lover, but no scholar has ever established which one. Michael's short stories consider all the candidates the scholars have put forward, and the plausibility of the evidence for each one.
The chapter Crossing Out The Emperor itself contrasts Beethoven in the isolation of his deafness to Napoleon's isolation as the deposed Emperor on the remote south Atlantic island of St. Helena, and recounts Napoleon's horrible death as diagnosed by Miroslav Holub in The Dimensions Of The Present Moment (1990).
Michael is a student of both Napoleon's March On Russia 1812 and of Hitler's Russian Campaign 1941-1944. His hero of 1812 is Napoleon's aide de camp Armand-Augustin-Louis de Caulaincourt, and his hero of Operation Barbarossa , as Hitler called his invasion, is the Wehrmacht Field Marshal Heinz Guderian. Sacked by Hitler at the front four times for insubordination, Guderian nevertheless survived, and, though he stood trial at Nuremburg, was acquitted of all war crimes.
Michael is currently researching his second novel, about the Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand.
