A wealth of material
Duncan Fallowell
A LIFELONG PASSION: NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, THEIR OWN STORY by Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 667 So much could be said about this magnificent, tiresome, candid, absurd and terribly moving book. Within a chronologi- cal structure clearly set out by the editors, its narrative is built up from linked extracts — some a few sentences, others a page or two — taken from the private diaries, let- ters, telegrams, memoirs of the imperial family and courtiers who were close to them. A small but crucial selection of police and state documents interpose themselves here and there .
Though the title, A Lifelong Passion, is not a lie, the Mills and Boon presentation does a disservice to the seriousness of a book which is based substantially on unpublished sources of central importance. It also suggests a fairly exclusive textual interaction between the Emperor and Empress which is far from being the case. The words of the children, grand dukes and duchesses, ambassadors, and foreign rela- tions such as Queen Victoria and George V make an even greater contribution.
The result is a broader, deeper, richer compost than one had been led to expect. The years of Nicholas II's life (1868-1918) embrace one of the great periods of Russian and world history, comparable to Periclean Athens, Medici Florence, Elizabethan England, in its concentration of drama and creativity. It began with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky and ended with Stravinsky and Diaghilev and was packed — to bursting, we now know — with geniuses, monsters and angels. No wonder, with the sudden access to previously forbid- den archives, the books are coming thick and fast.
Nothing in this volume alters the essen- tial features of the story. The main prob- lem for the editors must have been the sheer amount of original material (the pre- sent slab was edited down from a first draft of 2,500 pages) which would allow them to indulge any bias they chose. In general they have been kind and taken a romantic and personal rather than a political line. These are after all intimate papers.
Perhaps the primary achievement of the book is to convey the constant and appalling psychological pressure under which Nicholas and Alexandra attempted to function. Even at the best of times, they were both very shy people who loathed state occasions. Alexandra, however, comes across as far less neurotic than her reputa- tion. Indeed she emerges as a strong and wonderfully loving and faithful woman, capable of writing with beautiful sentiment: `I love to look at you when I cannot sleep and the room begins to get light.'
Nicholas and Alexandra always wrote to each other in English. It was her first lan- guage as she'd been brought up partly at Windsor. Its quality is an unexpected indi- cator of the Empress's sufferings. Gushing and idiomatic at the outset, it smooths with motherhood, but goes to pieces towards the end of the reign, becoming highly ungrammatical, at times barely comprehen- sible. After the abdication and the family's arrest, however, her English attains an absolute simplicity that is both serene and terrible.
All around the imperial couple 300 years of Romanov rule had been coming to the boil and there was very little they could have done about it. They were besieged by squabbling and incompetent relations. Nicholas was not without gifts but he hadn't enough of them and fatally lacked — as, we read, his wife was well aware the timbre of authority. The haemophiliac only son was ever at the threshold of death. And the information assault of telegraph and telephone would of itself have guaran- teed that hereditary autocracy must die in the modern age — it was too much for one polite person to carry for a lifetime.
In an attempt to think straight, Nicholas and Alexandra preferred to spend their time in the country rather than the capital. It is clear they lived modestly (Fabergd is mentioned only once) with the minimum of receptions. In the evenings they received comforting words from a spiritual healer the psychotherapy which Rasputin provid- ed had nothing particularly weird about it in a country like Russia with a mystical strain. His sins were minor (he was not the court gigolo and certainly never slept with the Empress), his political influence was negligible, and he had hypnotic powers which could staunch haemophiliac bleed- ing. But doom and paranoia were in the air. At the very least he was bad public relations and seemed to have access to the supreme authority as few did.
Many other things too are clearer for reading this book — how retarded Nicholas was as a result of being excessively well brought up on the genteel English pattern (until far into adulthood his letters read like a 14-year-old's, though not without charm: 'The desire to get married lasted until luncheon, and then went away'); how intensely bonded were the family of father, mother, four daughters, a son (their effu- siveness with each other is extreme, as is their Christian piety); how unpleasant was the behaviour of the British government and Cousin George V when the final crisis came, pleading that British public opinion was violently against an offer of asylum. Was it? On what evidence?
Bubbling about the great themes is a flow of fascinating incidental detail and minor revelation — the public steam baths of St Petersburg were the resort of both heterosexual and homosexual hanky-panky, as indeed they still are — and perhaps the last question should be: is this book trust- worthy? I think so — although Nicholas could never have been quite as vapid as he is here, and the very first dates in the book's opening genealogical table seem suspect: were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert both born in 1891?
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