Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra - Softcover

Kurth, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316557889 ISBN 13: 9780316557887

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 1998

Synopsis

This spectacular illustrated history tells the story of the last Romanovs - one of the great tragic love stories of all time - with unparalleled vividness & intimacy. The text, which follows Nicholas & Alexandria from their childhood's to the Siberian cellar where their lives ended, is complemented by rare images from the imperial family's private collections (locked away for decades in Soviet archives, & published here for the first time), as well as by contemporary full-color photographs of the places & palaces the Romanovs knew.

About this title

Review:

It's easy now to indulge in nostalgia about the era of the Romanovs, and the sheer lushness of this gorgeous book is enough to encourage the indulgence. Even the text, highly readable and informative, is a little rose-tinted in places, but perhaps the authors can hardly be blamed when the gentlemanly cruelties of the old regime look so innocent next to the quintessentially totalitarian 20th-century hell that replaced them. (Nowhere was the true nature of the new "people's" dispensation revealed more vividly than in the lurid, incompetent savagery with which Nicholas II and his family were dispatched, a story reconstructed in considerable detail here.) In any case, despite a touch of sentimentality, this is a fine short history of how the Romanov dynasty ended, artfully disguised as a coffee-table book. If you merely flip through the pictures (Ekaterinburg, Tsarkoe Selo, the Cathedral of Peter and Paul at St. Petersburg, shining like a gold dagger in the snow), you will ache to travel to Russia. If you read the text, you will learn a surprising amount about the world of an almost comically ineffectual man with whom the Fates amused themselves by placing him at a key turning point in modern history. Heartless autocrat that he was, you may even end up feeling sorry for him: the cure was so much worse than the disease. --Richard Farr

About the Author:

Peter Kurth has written for VANITY FAIR, THE NEW YORKER etc. ISADORA has taken him 10 years to write.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0316557889
• ISBN 13: 9780316557887
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230