Nicholas & Alexandra:
 The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia
 The State Hermitage Museum
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1998 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Pub.
  ISBN: 0810936879

When Nicholas II was crowned Tsar in 1896, he inherited a long history, a vast realm, many palaces & much wealth. He also inherited the spawning unrest of an oppressed & hungry populace. Here is a catalog of part of that national wealth as well personal items from its monarch's life.

When I hauled this huge & heavy tome home, sat before a roaring fire with a cup of tea, I suddenly remembered the fragile, jewel-encrusted old lady who lived in the apartment next to us, over-looking the rooftops of Little Venice in London.

When I was seventeen, I took tea once a week with this awe-inspiring stranger. We drank a brew very different from my mother's, from glasses set in silver holders. The amber of the tea mimicked the globes dangling from her ears & the beads looped around her throat. I felt like a bull in a china shop as I perched on a settee in a room filled with wonderful treasures, listening to her memories.

Of her childhood in a Russia long fallen into blood & dust. Of her visit to her aunt's home when The War stranded her in England. She had never gone home, never married, never seen her family again only received the five crates into which had been packed all that now filled her apartment.

Nicholas & Alexandra opens at the entrance to The State Hermitage Museum with larger than life statues holding up the foyer roof; a beautiful start to a tour of a once-upon-a-time world of court portraitists, illustrators & painters.

After we've met just about every member of a long-gone family we are introduced to the few & rare surviving Icons of Russian ecclesiastics. A dip into deeply religious passion.

In Watercolours, Drawings, and Engravings are views of St. Petersburg, elegant forerunners of those postcards we're so fond of sending home. Delicate glimpses of stately edifices where people actually lived & worshiped; of a social life in panoramas of fireworks, records of hunts with delightful illustrations.

In Photographs we enter the unsuspecting final decades of a family's snapshots catching casual moments, spontaneous actions. The ordinary life of a father, a mother & their children. I found myself wondering what were the sounds & smells of the palaces & their company.

Then, because we are viewing the memorabilia of monarchs, we come upon Orders and Medals the honors of which is like reading the roll call of history.

In Precious Objects we see the gifts husbands would give wives: an Easter egg; a steel hammer with ivory handle; photograph frames, personal icons; gifts boxes, vases & clocks. I loved the picnic box, chess set, early puzzles & grand piano.

Their Costumes hint of how the court lived; remind us how slowly people must have moved, how encumbered they were by their finery. Look beyond the regal robes to the rooms in which they stand & see another world.

I drooled over the Books even though I can't read Cyrillic. I longed to hold them, smell their fine vellum, trace their inked lettering. Here is the life of a family, their parties, diaries, gatherings & correspondence.

The Young Heir's World Tour include his diaries & card of his favorite entertainer, invitations, cards, pressed flowers & musical scores.

Soon shadows loom especially in the Coronation memorabilia & the bioscopic photo of the Khodynka Catastrophe.

The State Archive of the Russian Federation is a collection of sepia tints defining the Romanov genealogy - 1918 was a deadly year for royal Russian blood.

Family Life is simply that: a father & children, a husband & wife, casual portraits & formal sittings. The children's drawings as they age.

Grigory Rasputin's mesmerizing presence vibrates from the page, reminding us what a mystery & magnet he must have been to a family steeped in rigid protocol.

The photographs of the end of a monarchy, the end of a family are sad. Like the French Revolution a century before, the slaughter of the elite, the wealthy had begun.

When I look through the pages of Nicholas & Alexandra, linger in the company of people so heavily clothed & so contrived in their daily rituals I get glimpses of how it all came about.

This is an extraordinary collection of memorabilia, haunting because their owners are all gone now & impressive because it is a measure of a nation's brilliant artisans & wealth.
(02/06/00)

Rebecca