The collection features volume VII from the collected works of the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller. The book has a black and green cover.

This set of 5 books contains the history of the Thirty Years’ War in two parts, translated by the Russian poet and literary critic Nikolai Vasilyevich Gerbel.

Friedrich Schiller wanted to answer the question of why a centralized national state was not created in 17th-century Germany. He was also interested in the causes and consequences of the Thirty Years’ War, a series of military conflicts in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and Europe as a whole from 1618 to 1648. Friedrich Schiller’s second major historical work, “The History of the Thirty Years’ War”, which was published in 1791–1793, was devoted to these topics. The first work was “The History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands Against Spanish Rule” published in 1788.

The book of the German classic became available to the general public after the publication of the translation by Gerbel, who began publishing foreign poets in Russian from the late 1850s. Nikolai Vasilyevich managed to assemble a collection of the best translations of foreign classics of poetry, which had previously been scattered in various magazines.

In 1857, a collection of Schiller’s works was published, followed by works of William Shakespeare, George Gordon Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and other authors, as well as anthologies of the best works of German, English and Slavic poets.

The Ulyanovs had many works by foreign writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain and other classics — both in Russian and in the original language. Vladimir Lenin’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, knew English, French and German. She preferred to read the works of foreign authors in the original language. Great attention was also paid to the study of Russian classical literature. The family loved to read the works of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and other writers.