William Alexander Gerhardie was born in St. Petersburg in 1895. He spent a youth of his time, on the verge of the great cataclysms of the twentieth century. Raised in czarist Russia, in the bosom of a prosperous English family, Gerhardie participated in the First World War as a military attaché in Petrograd and witnessed the Russian Revolution in Siberia, as a member of the British Military Mission. Futility, his first novel, which he wrote while studying at Worcester College in Oxford, recounts his experiences as an anti-Bolshevik soldier in the Russian Revolution. His next novel, The Polyglots (1925), strongly influenced by Chekhov's tragicomic style, is unanimously considered his masterpiece. In 1928 he published Doom, a work almost equal to its predecessor, although it would have less influence on writers of later generations. In 1934 would appear Resurrection, the last work that, under his name, would publish in life. After the Second World War Gerhardie's fame faded, and his work went out of style. Although he continued to write, he was the subject of several compilation publications in the seventies. Upon his death, in 1977, he was found among his belongings a novel that collected the history of the world between 1890 and 1940, God's Fifth Column. Only in recent years has his figure been vindicated and, thus, William Boyd would consider The Polyglots the most influential English novel of the 20th century, picking up the witness of Evelyn Waugh, who considered him a true genius, or Graham Greene, who I had him for the most brilliant writer of his generation.