Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia

Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia is a collection of tall tales published in English in 1785 in England by the German-born writer Rudolf Erich Raspe, centered on a fictionalized version of Baron Munchausen loosely based on a real German nobleman, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen. The book presents a sequence of impossible, boastfully narrated adventures told in the Baron's own voice, including episodes at the Ottoman court in which he encounters the Sultan, steals the royal treasury and escapes by sea, satirizing the exaggerated travelers' tales and military memoirs fashionable in the period. Though first published anonymously in English rather than German, the book was soon expanded and translated back into German by Gottfried August Burger, and its comic exaggerations gave the Baron's name to the lasting English idiom of a Munchausen tale, as well as to multiple later film adaptations.