After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

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those interested in exploring a variety of unique perspectives on the Russian Revolution will find a wealth of information within these pages. Instead, the resident star dancer, La Goulue (immortalized in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec), danced a cancan for him, after which Alexis is said to have literally covered her body with banknotes. Some, like Bunin, Chagall and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans like Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Historian Helen Rappaport reveals new details about the glamorous lives and tragic deaths of the last Russian czar's four daughters. This author might have one of the most comprehensive knowledge bases of the Russian Revolution and the diaspora thereafter, from the Romanovs to simple people who just wanted to stay alive. On being aroused, the grand duke was presented with a bill for five hundred francs, but had no means of paying. But she was already married—to a captain in the Horse Guards—and had three surviving children by him.

La Balletta had, they complained, “cost the Russian people more than the Battle of Tsushima”—a naval debacle that had forced Alexis’s resignation. There was a beautiful anecdote in the last chapter of how an ordinary Russian taxi driver survived which showed the phlegmatic mindset, that maybe some of the nobility could have done with early on. The historical references abound, but the bits in between, as others have commented, feel a bit odd. But sometimes when the Boyars were out for a whirl, their behavior got out of hand: one particular count was “partial to making pincushion designs with a sharp-pronged fork on a woman’s bare bosom,” and a group of Russian officers “played an interesting little game with loaded revolvers. Alexis made frequent extravagant trips to Paris with Vladimir—so much so that it was a common joke in St.

As a collective biography of some of the prominent artistic and aristocratic figures, After the Romanovs conjures up a real sense of the social and cultural lives of elite Russian Paris across the revolutionary divide. More about Russians in the arts, and the mourning of Russian emigres for relief from feelings of separation in the 1930s. Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the youngest of the four sons of Alexander II, was by far the most modest and democratic of the Russian grand dukes; his beautiful home at Boulogne-sur-Seine would become, thanks to the charm and social skills of his wife, Olga, Countess von Hohenfelsen, not just a magnet for the most cultured and influential on the French literary, musical, and political circuit but also effectively an “annex” to the Russian embassy in Paris. But Paul was not allowed to reclaim his children from his widowed sister-in-law Ella, and Olga was not welcome. Such had been their predilection, since the 1860s, for visiting under cover of darkness all that the Parisian underworld of eroticism, not to say vice, had to offer that the concept of La Tournée des Grands Ducs (The Grand Dukes’ Tour) had become a feature of the off-the-map Paris tourist trail.A few adapted well (with the most successful eventually emigrating to America) but most could not reconcile their eventual fate with their former grandeur. Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers such as Coco Chanel. For the French-speaking Russian aristocracy, Paris for the last forty years or more had been a home away from home, a safe haven in winter from the bitter cold of the northern Russian climate and the rising threat of revolution that was increasingly targeting their class.

She lives in the West Country, and has an enduring love of the English countryside and the Jurassic Coast, but her ancestral roots are in the Orkneys and Shetlands from where she is descended on her father's side. It also answers questions over why they could not stage a counter revolution as they were so fractured and unable to support each other. This more lowly title still did not solve all the precedence issues, however, and Olga’s status remained a subject about which Paul was highly sensitive. Darkly handsome, with his “immense height … piercing eyes and beetling brows,” Vladimir was the most powerful of the grand dukes. At his famous cabaret in Montmartre, the singer Aristide Bruant would yell out “Here come the Cossacks” whenever the Russians descended for an evening’s carousing.Petersburg he served from 1876 to his death as president of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy and enjoyed an extremely influential position in the art world.

He was a most imposing if not frightening figure, as was his worldly and equally formidable German-born wife, Maria Pavlovna (originally, Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin).

The police were sent for and, wrapping the grand duke in a tablecloth, put him in a cab to take him to the police station. I've read every memoir of this period available in French and English, so I may be a slightly jaded reader. The top-notch historian Helen Rappaport brings to life the world of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought refuge in belle époque Paris. Traces the Russian encounter with Paris from the city’s glittering years as an expat playground before World War I to the grimmer reality of life in exile after the Bolshevik seizure of power. He invited her to a tête-à-tête dinner later at Maxim’s, where they ate Beluga caviar and celebrated the Franco-Russian alliance in style.