http://www.helenrappaport.com/
THE LOST LIVES OF THE ROMANOV GRAND
DUCHESSES
PUBLICATION: UK :
Pan Macmillan, 27 March 2014 USA : St Martin 's
Press, 3 June 2014
The four captivating young Romanov sisters
were perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early
twentieth century. And with good reason; they were much admired for their happy
dispositions, their looks, and their devotion to their parents and sick
brother. From an early age they were inevitably at the centre of unceasing
gossip about the dynastic marriages they might make. But who were they really
beyond the saccharine image perpetuated by those now familiar photographs of them
as pretty girls in white dresses and big hats?
What were their personal hopes, dreams and aspirations and how did they
interact with each other and with their parents? What was life really like
within the highly insular Imperial Family and how did they really feel about
their mother’s obsessive and all consuming love for their spoilt brother
Alexey?
Over the years, the story of the four
Romanov sisters and their tragic end in a basement at Ekaterinburg in 1918 has
clouded our view of them, leading to a mass of sentimental and idealized
hagiography. They are too often seen merely as set dressing, the beautiful but
innocuous background to the bigger, more dramatic story of their parents – Russia ’s last
Tsar and Tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra.
They are perceived as lovely, desirable and living charmed lives. But
the truth is somewhat different.
For most of their short lives the four
Romanov sisters were beautiful birds in a gilded cage, shut away at their
palaces at Tsarskoe Selo or Livadia as a reaction to the fear of terrorist
attacks on the Imperial Family. In
reality the sisters had few friends and were largely cut off from the real
world outside and the normal life experiences of other girls – that is, until
everything changed in 1914. Suddenly, with Russia ’s entry into the war, the
girls had to grow up fast.
In a deliberate echo of the title of
Chekhov’s play, Four Sisters sets out to capture the joy as well as the
insecurities and poignancy of those young lives against the backdrop of the
dying days of late Imperial Russia, drawing on previously unseen and
unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs of the period.
The book is also the subject of a
forthcoming documentary ‘Russia ’s Lost
Princesses’, which the author has been working on with Silver River Productions
for BBC2. A transmission date will be
announced soon. www.silverriver.tv
Four Sisters
review – an intimate portrait of the doomed
Romanov grand duchesses
The tsar's
daughters, murdered in the Russian revolution, take centre stage in Helen
Rappaport's powerful account of the end of the Romanovs
Lara Feigel
The
Observer, Sunday 30 March 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/30/four-sisters-romanov-duchesses-helen-rappaport-review
The four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II were
murdered almost by accident. "I will never be the Marat of the Russian
revolution," pledged the prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, after the
February revolution in 1917. He tried to find the family refuge outside Russia (Britain 's
George V couldn't help, although Nicholas's wife, Alexandra, was the
granddaughter of Queen Victoria ) and then sent
them to Siberia hoping that the Russian
populace would forget about them. But revolutions demand their victims. The
entire family was moved to Ekaterinburg and shot. Helen Rappaport has already
written about the Romanovs' terrifying final weeks in prison. Now she moves
from nightmare to fairytale, placing the four beautiful grand duchesses centre
stage for the first time.
What is most surprising in this story is
quite how unsuited the family is to power. They all live chiefly for each
other. Alexandra finds the business of state "a horrid bore" that
keeps her husband away from her. Nicholas comes home for the children's
bathtime every night and records episodes of teething and weaning in his diary.
When Nicholas abdicates, his first thought is that now he can "fulfil my
life's desire – to have a farm, somewhere in England ".
Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia are
bright, wilful girls who are devoted to their parents and to their precious
little brother Alexey. The tsarevitch appeared just when Nicholas was
despairing of ever providing the country with a male heir, and the girls grow
up conspiring to keep his constantly life-endangering haemophilia a secret from
the nation. Anxious to protect her son and fearing the moral iniquity of St Petersburg society,
Alexandra keeps her children secluded in their countryside palace. The
"girlies" (as Alexandra persists in calling them) long for news of
"outside life" but have little interest in court intrigues. They are
delighted when they can wander around an English village with money of their
own to spend.
For all four sisters, the ideal life would
be one of quiet middle-class domesticity with a soldier husband. Infantilised
by Alexandra, they are allowed to run wild with the soldiers who escort them on
their annual holiday to Crimea . Even as
teenagers, they play boisterous games of hide and seek with the handsome young
officers; at one stage 10 people crammed into a wardrobe. Everything changes in
the first world war when Alexandra, Olga and Tatiana train as nurses (typically
modest, they take the titles of Sister Romanova numbers 1, 2 and 3). Now at
last the girls have the contact with the outside world they have longed for as
they change dressings and help with operations. But again it's the ordinariness
they most love. "It's only at our hospital that we feel comfortable and at
ease," Olga tells one of her patients.
Because the grand duchesses are so ordinary
their story can feel tedious. The book seems quite long and slow at times as
they go on one holiday after another while Alexandra's health steadily
deteriorates. The sisters are too young to be complex (they are aged between 17
and 22 when they die). Rappaport is keen to transcend the saccharine image of
four fairytale princesses by emphasising their flaws, but all she can say is
that they throw things at their siblings and rag their tutors. The chief drama
comes not from their individual stories but from their untimely deaths. We know
that, like all good fairytales, this one will have a nightmare ending and
Rappaport sets it up powerfully so that we remain uneasily frightened
throughout.
Psychologically, Nicholas and Alexandra are
more interesting than their children. Rappaport is insightful in her analysis
of Alexandra's vulnerability and mistrust of strangers. And in the process she
illuminates the precise influence of Grigory Rasputin, the drunken hypnotic
pilgrim whose close association with the family contributes to their
unpopularity. Alexandra disapproves of Rasputin's intemperance as much as her
subjects do, but she is helpless because she believes that no one else can save
her son. His effects on Alexey's health are visible to all around them; he can
cure the tsarevitch's bleeding attacks simply by speaking to him on the
telephone. Also, the isolation in which they live makes her more susceptible to
his power. At times, he seems like their only friend.
There is a danger of making too much of all
this. Four Sisters is a work of history as well as biography and arguably
Rappaport is too eager to tackle historical causation. She says early on that
the tsar and his family were destroyed by "a fatal excess of mother love".
Lenin and the Bolsheviks are barely mentioned. But if this is unashamedly
history from above, then it is also history from within; an astoundingly
intimate tale of domestic life lived in the crucible of power.
Lara Feigel is the author of The Love-charm
of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury ).
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